I thought the feature I’m working on was sunk. An API we integrate with is, let us say kindly, Very Much Not Great. Other vendors provide an API where we can request All The Things and retrieve it page by page. This API was not nearly so great, barely documented, and the example query to do what I needed didn’t even work.
Sunk.
Luckily, only an hour in, I rolled over to the product manager and asked if it was okay if we were a little clever about the feature. We couldn’t request All The Things, but we could request Each of The Things that we knew about. It wasn’t great, but it was better than sunk.
The product manager proceeded to tell me that was okay and in fact that’s kind of how the feature works for other APIs too. I hadn’t noticed this because I was up to my neck in code details. She described how this feature is used in out onboarding process. It wouldn’t matter, at that level, whether we made a dozen requests or a hundred.
I wrote basically no code that day. Someone who “crushes code” or “moves fast and breaks things” would say I didn’t pull my weight. Screw ‘em.
I didn’t go down a rabbit hole valiantly trying to figure out how to make a sub-par API work better. I didn’t invent some other way for this feature to work. My wheels were spinning, but only for a moment.
Instead, I worked with the team, learned about the product, brainstormed, and figured out a good way forward. I call it a very productive day.
