I’ve worked in the public sector of Denmark for quite a while, and that’s involved a loot of different APIs, and I’ve seen my share of the “poor-experience” exa

I’ve worked in the public sector of Denmark for quite a while, and that’s involved a loot of different APIs, and I’ve seen my share of the “poor-experience” examples. It’s always worse when there isn’t an API. That being said, the best APIs are the ones that have good understandable documentation. And I don’t mean some auto generated bullshit, but documentation that your developer can hand off to your data person and whatever project manager is ordering the information, and they’ll not only understand it, they can use it to tell your developer exactly which Y goes into X. Beyond that you’ll want a decent test API, and you’ll want workable examples of how to make each call in JS/python/c#/java/php at the very least. And you’ll probably still want the option for batch dumps via SFTP or whatever. So no, I don’t think APIs are elitist, I just think most of the people who make them either suck or weren’t given enough resources to do a good job.