What is your biggest challenge with APIs?

Tim Lane, Software Developer at ACME Corporation

Well, just carving out the time to do them, right? I have such a huge workload as well as a full calendar of meetings and, and in a company that doesn't really value self service and I'm in an immense and often unrealistic amount of pressure to deliver new products and features. If I could just get 25 percent more time without meetings, I could move mountains when it comes to the consistency, quality, and reliability of my APIs. Instead, I find myself cutting corners on documentation, examples, and other resources that would save consumers of my APIs time and money. And since most of my APIs are used within my own company, this would save us a lot of time and a lot of money.

Kin Lane, API Evangelist at API Evangelist LLC

Well, it's gotta be API education, ensuring that people understand that APIs matter in the first place and are literate in at least the API basics. I encounter numerous very smart and well meaning people, as well as some not so well meaning people who are producing and consuming APIs as part of their business, but they don't even have the basics like REST, JSON, YAML, and the other building blocks you need. Enterprises just don't properly invest in API literacy. Venture capital often forbids their portfolios from spending money on education in this area. There is a massive vacuum in this space when it comes to API literacy. Resulting in a noisy mix of information, disinformation and misinformation out there when you're trying to, and they're just trying to generate page views. If companies who invest in the fundamentals with web API and literacy, everybody would be better off for it.

Sebastian Loch, Business Development at FatSecret

We operate in this niche, very niche market of nutrition data that, that most people are not familiar with. And, you know, our API is embedded in so many modern day health and fitness applications, medical applications that no one knows about. It's fully white labeled. So it's this niche market and it's really difficult to make, you know, a proper business out of it. And it took us. Probably 10 years really to be, to be Frank, um, to, to build a proper, um, API licensing business and at the same time doing it at scale globally. So we operate across 56 countries and we provide verified nutrition data. So scaling this business globally. Finding the right partners and the right customers is probably the biggest challenge.

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