Everything needs an API

Common sense that’s worth remembering:

The smart game is building a robust API and let others get creative.

(via A VC)

Everything I do from now on needs to start with an API. We started a 3rd party integration project recently where I had to make one, and it was amazing a) how much re-work was required to expose functionality that already existed and b) how much of our internal code is rapidly migrating over to use the API calls.

I heard this advice a while ago and discounted it because I didn’t want to take a latency hit from a web call within my app to more code that’s essentially in my app, but I finally realized how much of an idiot I was being: your app doesn’t have to use the HTTP interface. You can just call the internal libraries (because you are decoupling your web interface from your core code, right?)