APIs Are 100x More Important Than Five Years Ago, and Still Uncool

Nobody wants to talk about APIs at a dinner party, and they never will. APIs are plumbing, and plumbing is invisible right up until the moment it fails. I have made peace with this after a long time doing this work–the API will never be the cool thing in the room. But I want to say something that sounds like a contradiction and is not: APIs are roughly a hundred times more important today than…