Fun In Horrible API Land

There’s plenty of API horror stories out there, I figured I’d share mine. This is a story of a certain API of a certain piece of software and the trials and tribulations I went through to avoid making users upload a CSV file.

Background: There’s not a lot of software in the space of the company I was working for at the time. The quality ranges from poor to less poor and my company opted for one of the less flexible more stable bad options–I will call it Athletic. This was customer facing software that had a very decent user experience if you were a customer and a very bad experience if you were actually paying for it.

So I’m building a web app to be used internally at my company which needs data from the software in Athletic. The options are: 1. Download an excel spreadsheet that you can export from Athletic, convert it into a CSV, and upload it. This works, but is a painful process for users and this will need to be repeated weekly, sometimes more often. Option 2 is to use Athletic’s API. I opt for option two. So the odyssey begins.

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