Api Design

You can spend a whole afternoon making a request go from 600ms to 90ms. No new feature. No UI change. No one notices. At least, not in the way they notice a new button. But they do notice. They just don’t know what they’re noticing. They stop hesitating. They stop mistrusting the product. They stop waiting for the spinner to betray them. That feeling is backend. And I think that’s where the beauty is: in the parts that disappear. ...

“Why does it do that?” She was seven, sitting next to me, asking about a box on my screen labeled /getUserSettings. I was halfway through writing documentation for it, and instead of brushing her off, I tried to answer, out loud, like a bedtime story. “Well, this little box lets other parts of the app ask, ‘What does this user like?’ And it answers with things like language, theme, and notification preferences.” ...