For a front-end developer like I am, backend code is the most boring type of code that I can write. How well the backend works always and hugely depends on how well the front-end is implemented, and while you can have a front-end only app, you can’t have a backend only app.

As a front-end developer though I find the backend very important and my only limitation in code and applications I can create is directly proportional to the amount of skill I have in writing APIs and backend code.

For this and a few other reasons, I needed to find a way to get a custom API up and running while writing as little code as possible.

The obvious solution and place I decided to start were with Content Management Systems. The most popular ones being Google’s Blogger and WordPress which most impressively runs 38% of the indexed web.

The problems I found with these two is that they come with a bundled frontend. However, they do provide some naked endpoints but Blogger provides very limited capabilities, for instance, you can’t display the content of a post and since its blogger is largely a blogging platform then the content types permitted are only ‘posts’. WordPress, on the other hand, does allow much more flexibility but it runs on PHP and its not the 90s anymore and PHP’s logo is an elephant, which, you know, speed.
I needed something modern.

I also looked into sentry.io which is one of the best headless CMS out there but the pricing plans were very much beyond what I can afford.

I ended up picking Strapi, a headless CMS written in Node, which allows you to create almost any type of application. It’s also open-source which is great for any kind of software. By the way, Strapi is used by Nasa, Walmart & IBM among others.

If you are interested in giving it a try you can look at this video on youtube or check out their documentation or their very simple quick start guide. Going through the video and quick start guide to Spinning out a custom API took less than 60 minutes.