I Stopped Building the Onboarding Fix. Now I Keep Score.

For the last couple of months I have been trying to fix API onboarding by building the fix myself. It started when SoundCloud showed me what programmatic onboarding should look like — one file, no dependencies, a browser pops for OAuth, and you walk away with a client_id printed to your terminal. I held that bar up against the providers, gateways, and identity platforms I depend on and wrote a single-file onboarding script for each one, thirty-six of them before I stopped counting.