Are you one of our loyal customers or even just an outside admirer who loves the MailChimp branding and all that cutesy stuff we do? If so, you probably want to quietly click away now because I am not some creative designer or even one of our awesome UI/UX folks. I maintain all aspects of our APIs and have for quite a while. So yeah, those guys don’t like it when I touch things that aren’t code.
3 ½ years ago, right before our v3.0 launch, the powers that be decided they wanted to heavily invest in our API. Sure, we had an API in one form or another prior to that, but it wasn’t versioned or well documented, and did all sorts of other stuff that wasn’t “web scale”. At all. That was a time when we were sporting about 40k active customers and looking at a few hundred API users (tops). Before we get into fun things like today’s real numbers, charts, and pretty pictures, let’s take a little stroll through the API’s history from conception….