Before building Anchor DNS, I wrote a small WordPress wrapper to help me talk to the Constellix DNS API. The code is up on Github: https://github.com/anchorhost/constellix-api. It’s amazing how clean the code turned out as all of the heavy lifting happens with wp_remote_get and wp_remote_post.
Creating the documentation before building anything saved me lots of time.
At the beginning I didn’t know how far I’d actually get to make anything useful. I started poking around at Constellix’s API in WP-CLI’s shell wp shell. Once I was able to get a few results back from the API, I decided to build the wrapper first as I wasn’t ready to begin coding the DNS interface. By focusing on the documentation and how I wanted to use the wrapper, I was able to cut down an enormous amount of time when it came to actually building the DNS interface.