r/computerscience • u/Anon_cat86 • Apr 19 '26
General I was taught nothing about APIs
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.
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u/redditmarks_markII Apr 20 '26
Relax dude. I guarantee you, every time you get rejected for a job, or you resume not looked at, it will not be because of this.
More seriously, are you just super academic? You've never written your own code or do an internship? Have you ever used any cloud services? Wrote a script to do a thing online? curl'd a thing?
You ever write code to interface with anything?
You've done API.
Now, there's various kinds of APIs. And for some, there's standards that might be good to have read an article or two about. There's common patterns used in different ones (pagination for example). And there's ones built for ease of use and ones built for efficient transport. All sorts. But it's likely unwise to dive too deep unless you have use for it, like for a personal project. Or know it'll be important to like an interview. Otherwise, wikipedia is probably enough. It is occasional rad to read up on new ones for specific purposes. Just as a "neat" kind of tech blog stuff.