Building REST APIs That Don't Suck: Patterns I Wish I Knew Sooner

Building REST APIs That Don't Suck: Patterns I Wish I Knew Sooner After building dozens of APIs in production, I've learned that the difference between an API that developers love and one they secretly hate often comes down to a few key patterns. Today, I'm sharing five approaches that have saved me countless debugging sessions and made my codebases actually maintainable. 1. The Repository Pattern: Abstraction That Actually Helps Here's something I see too often: business logic tangled directly with database calls scattered across route handlers. It's a mess to test and even worse to debug at 2 AM. The repository pattern changed this for me completely. Instead of mixing concerns, I abstract all data access: // repositories/UserRepository.js class UserRepository { constructor ( database ) { this . db = database ; } async findById ( id ) { return this . db . users . findUnique ({ where : { id } }); } async findByEmail ( email ) { return this . db . users . findUnique ({ where : { email }