- Building API integrations at scale reveals that API quality and documentation vary significantly, requiring a robust, standardized approach.
- Normalization is critical; different APIs use various formats for the same data types, making a unified internal schema essential.
- Error handling must be sophisticated to manage rate limits, transient network issues, and inconsistent status codes across providers.
- Webhooks are powerful but unreliable as a sole data source due to potential delivery failures, necessitating periodic polling as a fallback.
- Developer experience is often overlooked by API providers, making debugging and sandbox environments vital for third-party developers.
Entities: N/A (The article focuses on engineering team findings, Nango, OpenCode