Without an SDK, each of your customers writes their own code for authentication, pagination, and retries. When that code fails, a scheduled job stops on page four or an expired entitlement looks like an empty result, and the customer has to work out what happened.

I build SDKs that take over that code, and I maintain them as your API changes.

Your support questions show what the SDK should cover

The integration questions your support team already answers show where customers get stuck. The jobs customers run set the rest of the scope. Someone downloading a series as it stood on a past date needs different calls, storage, and error handling from someone keeping a local copy current as revisions arrive.

To start, I need your API documentation, credentials for a sandbox or test environment, and the runtime versions your customers use. I write SDKs in Python and Go, and I also deliver TypeScript packages held to the same tests. Each language is its own package with its own scope.

In the package

  • Typed records and errors in the customer’s language.
  • Authentication, pagination, and retries with backoff and a limit.
  • Distinct errors for bad credentials, a missing entitlement, throttling, and a query that matched nothing, so an expired entitlement doesn’t look like an empty result.
  • Page boundaries and continuation tokens, so a long download can commit its progress and resume.
  • A quickstart, an example for each workflow, and reference documentation.
  • CI that installs the built package and runs the examples on each supported runtime.
  • A versioning policy, and a release process your team can run without me, publishing under your organization’s registry account.

Tested as customers install it

I build the package, install it in a clean environment, and run each workflow against your sandbox. The expected results are worked out beforehand, without the SDK; mocks written alongside it would only test the SDK against its own assumptions.

Then I break each workflow partway through. A download cut off halfway, or one whose continuation token expired, has to resume and end with each record exactly once. When the API throttles past the retry budget or revokes access, the caller has to receive an error it can act on.

Some gaps need an API change

An SDK can’t make pages consistent if the server doesn’t read them from one snapshot, and it can’t follow revisions without a change cursor. When customers need a guarantee your API lacks, I document the gap and what the SDK can do without it. Changing the API is its own project.

Code generated from an OpenAPI specification covers the endpoint wrappers but not recovery, pagination controls, or examples, and those take most of an SDK project.

A behavior change can break customers without a new signature

A different ordering, retry default, or snapshot selection can break a customer’s job while every method signature stays the same. So maintenance includes a migration example whenever behavior changes, along with dependency updates, compatibility with API changes, bug fixes, and releases.

If you’re considering an SDK, send me a note on LinkedIn with your API and the languages your customers use. The questions your support team answers most often are a good place to begin.