I despise working with overengineered APIs that don’t make simple things simple. Nonetheless, I’m working on designing an API for an open-source library and I’m starting to feel that I’m falling into the overengineering trap. I really can’t tell for sure because, of course, I wrote the darn thing, so how it works is more obvious to me than anyone else. What are some warning signs from a developer’s perspective that your API might be overengineered?
I despise working with overengineered APIs that don’t make simple things simple. Nonetheless, I’m
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“What are some warning signs from a developer’s perspective that your API might be overengineered?”
No use cases.
If you can’t run through simple “to do this” scenarios, you’re not designing a useful API with specific use cases in mind.
Your documentation should be those use cases.
Features that don’t directly address the use cases are probably over-engineering.