Tom Scott made a wonderful video a while back about open APIs, and about how they (mostly) died out[0]. It's currently called "This Video Has 51,973,714 Views", and I personally believe it's a great watch.
APIs are more popular than ever. But developers in a weird way aren’t involved. Go look at tools like Tray, Boomi, Zapier, Integromat. They let business users use APIs to connect all their applications without wiring code.
I build APIs with the assumption that they'll be open eventually. If not open to the public then at least a third party or some other part of the company once it grows big enough. As such, all of my APIs are open, but some of them don't have a public endpoint. Working like this pushes me to consider how other people would use an API and think about more than just my use case, to document things properly, and spend more time on the DX. I think it makes my APIs better even if no one else actually ever sees them.
The downside is that some of the APIs I've built in the past have a bunch of features no one uses. That's a bad thing.
Tom Scott made a wonderful video a while back about open APIs, and about how they (mostly) died out[0]. It's currently called "This Video Has 51,973,714 Views", and I personally believe it's a great watch.
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0