The Art of API Design: Balancing Simplicity and Flexibility

This article delves into the crucial principles of API design, emphasizing the importance of avoiding breaking changes to existing user code. The author argues that good APIs should be simple and easy to use, yet maintain long-term flexibility. The article details technical aspects such as API versioning, idempotency, rate limiting, and pagination, and recommends using API keys for authentication to make it easier for non-engineer users. It concludes that a great product outweighs a perfect API, but a poorly designed product will inevitably lead to a poor API.