Picking the wrong API cost me 2 days. Now I treat it like a hiring decision.
Hey everyone,
While building a feature for my project, I integrated an API that looked perfect on paper — clean docs, solid examples, everything you’d expect.
A few hours in, things started breaking. Endpoints were inconsistent, some didn’t respond at all. After digging deeper, I realized the docs were outdated and the API hadn’t been properly maintained.
Lost almost 2 days on it.
What surprised me is how common this is. A lot of APIs look great from the outside but fall apart in real use:
Docs don’t match actual behavior
No clear update history
Support is slow or missing
“Top API” lists are often outdated
It made me rethink how I choose tools.
Because of this, I actually started organizing APIs in a more structured way while building — mainly to avoid going through the same trial-and-error again (ended up turning it into a small project, apives.com).
Still early, still figuring things out, but even doing this for myself has already saved time.
Now I treat APIs almost like hiring a team member:
Is it actively maintained?
Are there real-world usage examples?
Does it fail gracefully or just break?
Can I get a response if something goes wrong?
Curious how others handle this —
Do you have any process to vet APIs before integrating them?
Ran into this with a library I was using for Google Sheets integration. Docs looked solid, examples worked fine in testing. Hit a silent data mutation bug in production — writes were succeeding but the values were wrong. Took a while to even realize something was off because there were no errors.
The thing that would've saved me: checking the GitHub issues tab before integrating, not after. Most of the real-world edge cases were already documented there by other users. The official docs had nothing.
Now that's step one before I commit to anything.