front matter
I have been a professional software developer, off and on, for about 20 years now, and I’ve worked with a wide variety of APIs over those years. My youth was spent hacking together adventure games in BASIC and a little Z80 machine code, with no concern that anyone else would ever use my code, let alone need to interface with it. It wasn’t until I joined IBM in 1999 as a pre-university employee (affectionately known as “pooeys”) that I first encountered code that was written to be used by others. I remember a summer spent valiantly trying to integrate a C++ networking library into a testing framework with only a terse email from the author to guide me. In those days I was more concerned with deciphering inscrutable compiler error messages than thinking about security.