REST API BEST PRACTICES #5

Why Smart Engineers Build Dumb APIs (And Why It’s a Good Thing)

Over-Engineering kills your APIs

Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

Early in my career, I thought I was smart.

I wanted to build APIs that never break. I tried to make them future-proof.

I thought,

“If I plan for every future change now, I won’t need to update my API later.”

I was wrong ❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌

If you are not a medium member, Read it here.
Dear Folks, Your 50 claps 👏👏 help the discussion reach more developers 👀 on Medium, and your comments 💬 make me keep writing. Don’t forget to check out the responses💬 from other developers.

Future-Proofing Sounds Smart, But It’s a Trap

Think today, we need to save a user’s phone. A simple API UserDto would look like this:

public class UserDTO {
    private String phone;
}

✅ Works today.
✅ Easy to understand.
✅ No confusion.

Ohh Nope, Let me rethink.

But I thought,

“What if users can have multiple phones in the future?”