Today I took a step back and started learning APIs from scratch again on a Pluralsight course. It’s interesting how these things play out. I think it was in November or December, only 6 months after I started coding and a student of mine saw some Facebook post I made about it and sent me the link to Pluralsight, which I ignored because I was busy learning from YouTube videos.
It’s easy to say in hindsight, but Pluralsight had everything I need from the get go. It has courses covering every separate subject in C# programming. And even though it’s a paid service (around 40$ AUD a month), it’s extremely cheap for what it offers. Well, better late than never. My tortuous path will make me appreciate Pluralsight way more than I would if I hadn’t gone through the winding road.
Right now I have about five concurrent projects that involve creating and API, all of them scratching a personal itch: A budget application, a time tracker database, a sales records database and the archive I’m developing for my apprenticeship. All of them are slightly different from each other, in regards to api design, database relationships and data model characteristics.
The reason why I’m getting involved in so many projects at the same time is that I think it’s better than developing an api in a particular way and then moving on to the next isn’t so effective to provide a bird-eye view of api design as a whole. I just need to keep track of the main design and approaches used in these applications so I don’t spend too much time figuring out how each one works when I switch between projects.