API Archaeology: Working with APIs You Don’t Understand (Yet)

Most developers love building new APIs. Far fewer know how to work with existing ones, especially when documentation is missing, behavior is unclear, and the original authors are no longer around.

This talk explores a real-world approach to “API archaeology”: the process of reconstructing, validating, and safely evolving existing APIs without full context.

We’ll cover practical techniques to:

• Reverse-engineer API behavior from real usage
• Validate assumptions through testing and observation
• Identify risks before making changes
• Introduce structure without breaking existing consumers

This is not about clean design from scratch — it’s about making sense of what’s already there.