Welcome Sid to the Mission of Simplifying API Consumption
Xero! The success story you can’t miss if you’ve started up a company in New Zealand in the past decade. Besides getting inspiration, in the first month of APIMatic, we found ourselves using Xero for accounting, receiving advice from an engineering lead at Xero, and using Xero API to test and improve the output of our code-generator.
Years later, I met Sidney Maestre — the brains behind SDKs for Xero API — at a cafe in San Francisco, and I immediately knew that getting Sid onboard would be among the best things that could ever happen to APIMatic. Thankfully, Sid found the alignment too, and soon after we officially welcomed Sid to the APIMatic family.
Pre-built Code for Simplified API Consumption
We know APIs and API-driven software integration for quite some time. However, the next wave of API-first companies is shaping up an exciting phase of the API ecosystem known as the third-party API economy.
The best API companies are those that take a problem that is core to their customers’ businesses yet isn’t their core competency and provides a simple and cheaper solution …
developers shouldn’t need to build out a whole new payment system if their business is to sell sneakers, instead they should use Stripe, a company solely focused on building the best software for merchants to accept payments online — Josh Nussbaum
Some of these API-first companies such as Stripe, Twilio, Algolia and Contentful have even attained a unicorn status, thanks to their massive adoption among developers. A close look at these unicorns reveals a clear synergy among their developer experience strategies especially the API on-boarding process: they all provide pre-built code in the form of SDKs and Code Samples in a variety of programming languages. To learn more, watch this talk on-boarding practices of the fastest-growing APIs:
What Makes Sid’s Arrival So Special?
What makes me super excited about Sid is his years of experience in building SDKs at scale for multiple API companies. Sid not only understands the pain of manual API consumption from the consumer’s perspective but he also realizes an API provider’s frustration of manually maintaining SDKs. Such wealth of knowledge is vital for APIMatic’s mission of productizing the SDK experience, especially for the APIs constituting the 3rd party API economy.
APIMatic Mission: Productizing The Proven SDK Success
The massive developer adoption of the API-first unicorns is a clear indication of the effectiveness of SDKs. However, that does not come without a significant cost of maintaining SDKs. For the perspective, let’s put on the shoes of an API provider and imagine:
- building SDKs for an API in multiple programming languages
- keeping them in-sync with every new version of the language,
- updating the codebase for ever-changing dependencies,
- incorporating the latest additions in API specifications,
- testing the code with every iteration, and
- writing documentation for everything
The Devil is in the Maintenance
Notice that in the above list, every step is a continuous process besides the first step of building SDKs. Some API owners mistakenly consider this as a one-time investment, and either try using an open source generator in-house, or outsource the generation of SDKs and code samples as a one-off project.
On the other hand, for a continuously-maintained SDK project, you would need a dedicated team consisted of developers, QAs and technical writers, either in house or as outside contractors. This HR cost is non trivial, and the manual process is non scalable.
Code Generation As A Service
The SDK maintenance problem propelled us towards the mission of helping API vendors via a code-generation SaaS solution. Productizing the SDK generation not only eliminates the maintenance hassle, but also allow users to keep API docs as code, generate test cases, publish packages and much more, right along with the API updates.
Probably the biggest hurdle in this mission is the status-quo of the manual API consumption/integration practices. Enterprises, in particular, outsource the integration projects to software houses which take months to manually integrate APIs. This status-quo is fuelled by a lack of trust on the quality of machine-generated code and the associated cost of maintaining it.
With Sid joining the crew, we’re looking forward to educate API providers with faster API onboarding and adoption strategies. The goal is to challenge the status-quo by creating awareness on two fronts: a process of generating SDKs — which is scalable, and effectiveness of the generated code — that really works!
