There are many companies that now provides APIs for developers (Stripe, Twilio, Facebook, almost endless.), Which company do you think designed their APIs most elegantly?
I know, it is hard to describe, but you know when you see an elegant algorithm or a beautiful piece of code. You recognize it when you see well designed APIs also.
Love to hear your thoughts.
Though I have used APIs from the companies you have mentioned above, I feel Twitter's engineering team has done a great job with their APIs.
Their APIs are so robust that they have answers for all requirements you will need. Their documentation is very self explanatory and to the point, I didn't like Facebook's developer documentation though.
Not just to mention response times and data correctness and simplicity of their APIs. I sometimes wonder how easily they return data upon such a large data set. The scale with which they work is amazing. Out of billions of tweets, their APIs perform magic by having response times of nearly below 10s (worst case).
There are endless Twitter API wrappers available for every language, I have worked with Twitter4j (For Java) and Twython (For Python) and these wrappers simplify our job even more. It's as simple as it can get. If you have not tried their APIs I highly recommend everyone to give it a shot!
Cheers!
Aravind
Software Engineer At Hasura, Hashnode Alumnus
I feel like Github has done a good job with their API's. The visible proof for that would be the awesome Apps they have in their marketplace. In my opinion, the documentation is well thought out and clear. Also, they have a GraphQL version ¯_(ツ)_/¯