I've built a number of apis consumed by internal devs. Then there's one which I consumed in a mobile client–smoothest experience ever. I dogfed myself and empathised with any blind spot or skirmish that would have arisen if there was an external body

The ones consumed by others always end in tears and loggerheads. There was one with this girl who called me names and turned my relationship sour with the guys who contracted me. Our Altercation culminated in her hooking me, going as far as deleting personal media shared. That was my darkest hour supporting an api. Well, it started with her grumpy over broken endpoints, which I maintain were not that many

I wasn't an amateur dev at the time: I used conventions mastered post-suphle. Code was backed by automated tests and well documented. Now that I think of it, our earliest, innocuous argument was brought about by her incompetence. She didn't know some rudimentary stuff like how to build payloads or format to send to an api. Funny enough, the lead who contracted us both strongly vouched for her cuz they once worked together. He claimed she was no noob so I must be the faulty one

I'm about to release another api now. I've had all the time in the world to build it to production standard. Over 200 tests, all passing. In my head, I'm thinking, what could go wrong? Stakeholder introduced a feature breaking fundamental functionality. I refactored, implemented, connected tons of apis stubbed out in tests. Painstakingly began to fix broken tests to both fit integrated api behaviour and ensure system integrity is intact. Shit, software engineering is arduous. This is best case scenario unlike front end web or mobile where there is an unfixable bug or a ui requirement stumping you for literal days

Anyway atp I believe I've done my homework. The only thing that would likely do me in are those damned apis I rely on. One malformed response or missing key is enough to undo my meticulous efforts. I strongly hope not to have a huge fallout with the front end dev and the numerous third party consumers we're expecting

As an aside, On a different project entirely piggybacking off external apis, I'm supposed to write tests to verify their status. I wonder whether this is tenable or a waste of effort. But on paper, it's more reliable than building a postman collection and sending them from there