A Technical Journey into API Design-First: Best Practices and Lessons Learned Introduction As software engineers, we all know that APIs, or application programming interfaces, are essential building blocks for modern applications. From simple CRUD operations to complex integrations, APIs allow us to connect our applications with external systems and services seamlessly. However, designing a robust and scalable API is not always easy, even for experienced developers. In our latest project, we faced this challenge head-on. We needed to build an API for a new product that even in early prototyping stages could handle a large volume of requests, could be