Robert Buchanan, API Evangelist at Procter & Gamble
The biggest mistake I see all the time is. It's, uh, it's kind of twofold. It's realistically, they don't view APIs as more than a technical thing. And really it's a, it's a product. It's an experience. Um, there's a person that worked with me for a long time. They always said in every API governance or style guide meeting is APIs are ugly websites, right? And realistically, if you have a, uh, an API, which is not usable by a customer or usable by a developer, it's not a great API. And a lot of people think of, well, this company has to use our API. Well, the biggest mistake is not making it a good API or a good consumer experience for the API consumer, because then you have more support tickets. You have more flaws, you have more, um, you know, challenges in general. So I think one piece is, is. We're not treating 'em as products, we're not putting the time and effort into putting, you know, product on the shelf as with their APIs. They're just technical. And then the other problem is, is the people are taking databases and turning 'em into JSO and calling it an API like, let, let's not do that. That's a massive security problem. And also just horrible design .
