🤔 101 TECH BASICS 💡

What is an API?

A concise, simple definition you can tell your kid.

Image by chenspec from Pixabay

I’m sick and tired of ‘computer’ people lording over others their knowledge of technology, like they’re the only ones that can make fire.

There isn’t a secret handshake or super-intelligence required to understand the basics of this stuff. Trust me, I know. I’ve been a developer technical writer for more than a decade, writing for such companies as Schneider Electric, Elastic Path, and Atlassian. And I know for a fact that the basics are just never explained well enough for non-hardcore technology people to understand them.

And that’s done intentionally — makes the writer feel like they’re one of the elites and makes the reader feel like a fool. Which is win win for some author’s out there.

So I’m on a mission to make tech accessible to everybody, and it starts with this basic piece of crucial technology: APIs.

What is an API?

API stands for Application Programming Interface and it’s quite simply a piece of technology that allows two different systems to talk to each other.