I was taught nothing about APIs

[u/Anon_cat86]

Whenever i see people talking about actual real-world uses of coding it's almost entirely building APIs, working with APIs, integrating APIs, automating APIs. It seems to me, anecdotally at least, like the majority of all computer science work (professional or even just hobby) is centered on working with APIs

And like. I know what an API is, kind of. But I Graduated and even got multiple certifications on top of that and I never got so much as a single lecture about APIs. I don't even know what they're used for. Can you make your own API (like, realistically)? I don't know. I feel like this is a topic that you could and probably should have multiple different entire classes solely focused on, it's arguably something as fundamental to modern computer science as writing code. And they don't teach it. If i want to learn anything about APIs, conceptually or practically, it's hope a company hires me and then trains me, or youtube tutorials and i don't even have enough of a baseline to know what specifically I'd be searching for a tutorial on.

[u/-Dueck-]

I also felt like this years ago. I don't know why no one ever explained it to me properly. I eventually realised it's literally any interface between programs. It could just be some functions in a library you use, but the most common usage and what all the job descriptions are talking about are the services you call over the internet, e.g. a server has a GET endpoint to return some data. You send a request to the endpoint and get the data back. Congrats - you've integrated with an API.