We all know by now that APIs, application programming interfaces, make the world go around. More precisely, they let distinct modern applications communicate with each other. Mobile or web applications can access a backend where data is stored and processed. APIs can be public allowing applications from different companies to communicate or private, which is common, where internal applications integrate to meet business goals.

The result? More robust, full-fledged applications, websites and mobile apps with broader functionality and more diverse data.

For instance, rather than creating their own payment services from scratch, ride-sharing companies can add it via the APIs of payment companies. Another example are flight aggregator sites. In order to show us flight times, prices, destinations and everything else we need to know about a plane ticket, they connect via API calls to airline databases to pull the right data and display it to us in our aggregator search results page.