This Wasn't the Plan: Unexpected Engineering with Great APIs

We've all bent tools to fit weird use cases. What if Stripe could serve DNS records through its metadata system? Or Google Sheets could quietly power a live JSON API backend? This talk is a love letter to creative misuse: the kind of off-label engineering that starts as a "huh, I wonder if.." and ends with a surprisingly stable prototype.

More than once-off stunts, these are revealing case studies in what makes an API flexible, forgiving, and fun to build with. We'll dive into a pair of real-world experiments that take popular platforms far outside their comfort zones, and we'll explore what these weird successes teach us about developer experience, rapid prototyping, and why good APIs sometimes invite bad ideas.

Equal parts absurd and insightful, this talk is for anyone who's ever duct-taped a side project into existence, wondered “what if?”, or gotten carried away by the sheer joy of making things work - even when they shouldn't. You'll walk away inspired to ship faster, or at a minimum just appreciate how elegant design can enable the unexpected!

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Stripe Is My DNS Provider Now: When Good APIs Meet Bad Ideas »

Using Google Sheets as a JSON REST API »