Ask HN: Which web API's would you like to be easier to use?
I've noticed some common patterns in the things that I wish were already implemented for me when I've worked with web API's, so I'm thinking it might be useful to get these into a library or service so everyone wouldn't need to reimplement them every time.
For example, I always want to log every request sent and response received from the API (at least for a day or two), and how long each call took, since a remote API can always do something undocumented or have some transient problem, and I want to be able to figure out what happened. Not rocket science, but annoying to have to do every time.
And the process flow involving API calls often involve multiple steps (for example, we make a call, they return immediately with "ok, request received successfully", but then later they call one of our web hooks with the actual response). So providing some abstraction around the process could be useful, such as a providing a closure of the data used across the multiple steps and perhaps reifying the concept of a "step" would be useful.
Such effort would ideally start with some particular API to ground the implementation in reality: an API that is both painful to use and one that people care about.
And, in response to the comments of people who want or are building easier to use interfaces to existing API's, yes, I do want to hear about those. The part I'm thinking the most about right now wouldn't provide such an interface directly, but it might prove useful to someone who was implementing such an interface.