How to design clean, predictable APIs that any developer can understand in 5 seconds.

Before I understood REST, my API routes looked like this:

GET /getUsers POST /createNewUser GET /fetchSingleUser?id=5 POST /deleteUser GET /updateUserName

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They worked . But they were inconsistent, confusing, and every route had its own naming convention. If another developer looked at my API, they'd have to read every single route to figure out what was going on.

Then I learned REST — a set of principles that tell you exactly how to name routes, which HTTP methods to use, and how to structure your API so it's predictable, clean, and standard. The same routes above became:

GET /users POST /users GET /users/5 DELETE /users/5 PUT /users/5

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No verbs in URLs. Consistent patterns.…