Contract First or Die Trying: The Only Sane Way to Design APIs

I need to get something off my chest. Something that has been festering in my soul since the first time I joined a project mid-development and asked the fateful question: “Where is the API documentation?”

The answer, invariably, was one of the following:

1. “Check the Postman collection.” (Translation: a graveyard of 200 requests, half of which are outdated, named things like GET users FINAL v2 (copy))
2. “Just look at the code.” (Translation: reverse-engineer our spaghetti and good luck)
3. “We’ll document it later.” (Translation: we will never document it)