Each Airtable Datastore Comes With Complete API and Developer Portal

I see a lot of tools come across my desk each week, and I have to be honest I don’t alway fully get what they are and what they do. There are many reasons why I overlook interesting applications, but the most common reason is because I’m too busy and do not have the time to fully play with a solution. One application I’ve been keeping an eye on as part of my work is Airtable, which I have to be honest, I didn’t get what they were doing, or really I just didn’t notice because I was too busy.

Airtable is part spreadsheet, part database, that operates as a simple, easy to use web application, which with a push of a button, you can publish an API from. You don’t just get an API by default with each Airtable, you get a pretty robust developer portal for your API complete with good looking API documentation. Allowing you to go from an Airtable (spreadsheet / database) to API and documentation–no coding necessary. Trust me. Try it out, anyone can create an Airtable and publish an API that any developer can visit and quickly understand what is going on.

As a developer, API deployment still feels like it can be a lot of work. Then, once I take off my programmers hat, and put on my business user hat, I see that there are some very easy to use solutions like Airtable available to me. Knowing how to code is almost slowing me down when it comes API deployment. Sure, the APIs that Airtable publishes aren’t the perfectly designed, artisanally crafted API I make with my bare hands, but they work just as well as mine. Most importantly, they get business done. No coding necessary. Something that anyone can do without the burden of programming.

Airtable provides me another solution that I can recommend that my readers and clients should consider using when managing their data, which will also allow them to easily deploy an API for developers to build applications against.I also notice that Airtable has a whole API integration part of their platform, which allows you to integrate your Airtables into other APIs–something I will have to write about separately in a future post. I just wanted to make sure and take the time to properly add Airtable to my research, and write a story about them so that they are in my brain, available for recall when people are asking me for easy to use solutions that will help them deploy an API.