Originally published on Hashnode . Cross-posted for the DEV.to community.

The first public API I designed had 47 endpoints. Eight months later, 31 of them were either deprecated, broken, or quietly ignored by the only client that ever consumed them. Two were so badly named that we shipped a v2 just to rename them. One returned a different shape depending on which day of the week you called it, because of a bug nobody had caught in code review. The whole thing was a monument to what happens when an engineer designs an API by writing endpoints in the order they get requested.

That was 2021. Since then I have shipped four more public APIs and a handful of internal ones. Three of them I actually like. The other one is fine. None of them have the embarrassing mid-stream redesigns that the first one had. The difference is not that I got smarter.…