The Second Wave of the API-first Economy

Summary

Fifteen years ago, when some colleagues and I were building Heroku’s V3 API, we set an ambitious goal: the public API should be powerful enough to run our own dashboard. No private endpoints, no escape hatches. It was a stretch, but it worked. A new version of the company’s dashboard shipped on V3, and an unaffiliated developer who we’d never met before built Heroku’s first iOS app on it, without a single feature request sent our way. Our dashboard-on-public-APIs-only seems needlessly idealistic nowadays, but it was an objective born of the time. The year was 2011, and the optimism around the power of APIs was palpable. A new world was opening up. One of openness, interconnectivity, unbounded possibility. And we weren’t the only ones thinking that way: Only a year before (2010) Facebook released its original Open Graph API, providing immensely powerful insights into its platform data. Twitter’s API at the time was almost completely open. You didn’t even need an OAuth token — just authenticate on API endpoints with your username/password and get access to just about anything. GitHub was doing really impressive API design work, providing an expansive, feature-complete API with access to anything developers could need, and playing with forward-thinking ideas like hypermedia APIs/HATEOAS. You can still find traces of this bygone era, standing like some cyclopean ruins from a previous age. Hit the root GitHub API and you’ll find an artifact over a decade old — a list of links that were intended to be followed as hypermedia: $ curl https://api.github.com | jq { "current_user_url": "https://api.github.com/user", "current_user_authorizations_html_url": "https://github.com/settings/connections/applications{/client_id}", "authorizations_url": "https://api.github.com/authorizations", "code_search_url": "https://api.github.com/search/code?q={query}{&page,per_page,sort,order}", "commit_search_url": "https://api.github.com/search/commits?q={query}{&page,per_page,sort,order}", "em...