A recent theme among web creators is the notion of mobile first. It's the idea that we should design first for the mobile experience. Throw in the concepts of progressive enhancement and responsive design, and we have some excellent approaches to interface design and development. But where does that leave the overall software design? How do we get all the data to the interface and manipulate it without building a lot of back-end scripts to drive the various front-end incarnations? A centralized API will solve these problems, but we're often scrambling to implement the "mobile first" strategy on top of existing code. For good web software design, it's time to start thinking in terms of API first. In this talk, Ben Ramsey pulls from his experience making APIs to discuss how you can begin projects with an API-centric mindset and use this to your advantage to deliver software quickly, more efficiently, and with higher quality. If you already have projects that began life without APIs, then have no fear. Ben will also share how to use the same principles to convert existing web applications to API-backed software with some elbow grease, of course.