WTF Is An API?

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the blue collar nerd. If you've done any shopping for a web software in the past few years, you've probably heard the term API thrown around at you. But what exactly does that mean? Well, an API is an application programming interface, and basically it's what web applications use to talk to each other. So if something happens in application A, it can send information over to application B, and application B can do something with that information. It goes both ways. So if something happens in application B, it can send data back to application A and application A can do something with that information. APIs are super, super valuable for automation. In fact, I would say you're going to need an API to do maybe 90 to 95% of the automations that I'm going to be showing you on this channel. But it's not as scary as it sounds. Let's say you use ServiceTitan, for example. ServiceTitan has an API. You're golden. Now, they're currently not doing enough with their API, in my humble opinion. For example, their alerts. The alerts that you can set up in Servicetitan that's done through their API. So you can tell service titan, hey, whenever a job does not get sold, send me a text message or send me an email shooting a video. Inconsiderate. Or you can say, hey, service titan, whenever this particular task get sold out of the price book, send me a text message or send me an email. It's useful, it's cool, but you can do so much more. And you, you, the end user, can get your own hands on the API and then you can do whatever the heck you want with it. You can say, hey, send me an alert when a technician goes on this particular job type and doesn't spend at least an hour there and they don't sell at least this many dollars, you can do whatever you want. You can say, hey, whenever an install gets booked, put it on my calendar, put it on my spreadsheet, put it wherever you can put this information wherever you want to put it. You can do math with it. You can make a lot of stuff happen all on its own. APIs, they're awesome. So any application out there that doesn't have an API, it's dead to me. It might as well not exist. Here, there's some storage for them, that's where you keep them. They're useless because it just devalues a piece of software so much to not have this ability to communicate with other software. Because we use so many softwares these days, they need to be able to talk to each other. And when you know how to use the API for yourself and not just depend on the companies to, you know, make stuff for you, then, then things get really interesting. Till next time. Hey, by the way, if you like the video, be sure to hit, like, hit subscribe. Trying to grow this thing. It's just getting started here. So liking and subscribing that really helps grow the channel, helps let the YouTube algorithm know that it should show this video to more people like yourself. Really helps me out. Appreciate it.