Are you a victim of terrible API documentation?
Have you ever searched for hours looking for specific cases in which an API endpoint you're testing gets some error that's undocumented?
If any of the above applies to you, then you are probably a victim of crappy API implementation! You deserve compensation of a year's worth of coffee, or perhaps the payment for a shrink because of the mental breakdown you experienced while trying to make this API work.
On a more serious note however, frustration in API documentations and API testing is very common amongst developers. Countless articles have been made regarding the anguish that developers face when dealing with these lousily-documented/lousily-created API's for any multitude number of reasons.
There are actually a lot of reasons that API's can be terrible, and the scope of an entire API architecture's terrible-ness can be pretty wide. This article aims to highlight what not to do, so that API implementations can follow the path of least resistance for easy-to-read API documentation, and easy-to-do API implementation. This is based on what I believe to be the most common reasons developers get stuck on implementing API interactions.
This is admittedly a pretty long article. However the instances and evidence for bad API documentation and implementation is plenty, and deserves a stern, well thought-out rebuke. My aim was to point out the API implementation practices that stump developers the most, from personal experience, and I hope I did just that convincingly.
