Developer shares 5 REST API mistakes that drove away early users
A developer building their first public API for a task tracker lost users not due to poor product design but because of poor API practices. Key mistakes included returning HTTP 200 for all responses even on errors, lacking API versioning which broke a client integration when a field was renamed, and having no rate limiting that allowed a buggy script to crash the database for all users. Inconsistent error response formats across different code layers forced API consumers to write multiple custom parsers. The developer outlines fixes including proper HTTP status codes, versioned routes with deprecation headers, token-bucket rate limiting, a unified error schema, and paginated responses to handle large datasets.
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