Hacking APIs

Foreword

Imagine if sending money to a friend required more than opening an app and making a few clicks. Or if monitoring your daily steps, exercise data, and nutrition information meant checking three separate applications. Or if comparing airfares involved manually visiting each airline’s website.

Of course, it’s not hard to imagine this world: we lived in it not too long ago. But APIs have changed all that. They are the glue that has enabled collaboration across companies and transformed how enterprises build and run applications. Indeed, APIs have become so pervasive that an Akamai report from October 2018 found that API calls accounted for an astounding 83 percent of all web traffic.

But as with most things on the internet, if there’s something ...