Summary

In this chapter, we covered API-first as a mindset for creating and building APIs. The most important point in the API-first approach is that we should focus on what people want to do with our API. It’s hard to go wrong when we keep in mind both the people using the API and the jobs they need to get done with it.

We also saw how to use the curl command-line utility to make HTTP calls in order to inspect the APIs of other services. In this chapter, we studied three existing services for our fictitious company, BigCo: activity, account, and company. We noticed they each have a different API style (JSON-only, JSON-link, and JSON-form), and we learned how to use the curl tool to make requests to those APIs and store the requests on a disk for later reference.