API Integration & Development
Your tools should talk to each other without a person in the middle. I build the integrations and endpoints that connect your CRM, ERP, online store, finance systems and internal tools into one flow.
Any integration works on a good day. What separates one you can rely on is what it does on a bad day — when the vendor is down, the webhook arrives twice, or the payload gains a field nobody mentioned.
What you get
- Sync that survives the real worldIdempotency keys so a replayed webhook cannot double-charge or duplicate an order, and reconciliation to catch what slipped through anyway.
- APIs designed to be usedREST or GraphQL, versioned, documented with OpenAPI, with error responses precise enough to debug against.
- Events instead of pollingWebhooks with signature verification and replay protection, so systems react in seconds rather than waiting for the next poll.
- Visible when it breaksStructured logs, retry with backoff, dead-letter queues, and alerts that name the record and the reason.
- Credentials handled properlyOAuth 2.0, scoped keys, rotation, encryption at rest, and rate limiting. Nothing lands in a repository.
My API Integration & Development process
Map the systems
What holds which data, which direction it needs to move, and which system is authoritative when two disagree.
Choose the pattern
Webhook, polling, batch, or queue — decided by how fresh the data must be and what the vendor actually supports.
Build against failure
The connectors, plus the retries, idempotency and validation that make them dependable.
Review the security
Auth, transport, storage, scopes, and what an attacker could reach if one key leaked.
Deploy with monitoring
Dashboards, alerts and a runbook, so the first sign of a problem is not a customer complaint.
Tools I use for this
Chosen per project against your constraints and budget — never one stack forced onto every problem.
Questions I get asked about this
Webhook or API — which does my integration need?
Both, usually, because they solve opposite halves of the problem. A webhook is the vendor telling you something happened, the moment it happens: an order was paid, a deal moved stage, a subscription lapsed. An API call is you asking for or changing data on demand. So the common pattern is a webhook to wake the integration up, then API calls to fetch the full record and write it where it belongs. Webhooks alone are not enough, because a webhook that fails is simply gone unless you also reconcile by API; and polling an API alone means either stale data or a lot of wasted calls. Where a vendor supports only one, I build around what exists and add the other half in software.
What if the tool I use has no public API?
There are usually options, in descending order of how much I like them. Many vendors have a partner or enterprise API that is not on the public docs and is available on request. Failing that, a scheduled export to SFTP or email, or a Zapier-style connector, often covers the need. Browser automation is the last resort — it works, and it breaks whenever they change their markup, so I will only build it if you understand it is a maintenance commitment rather than a one-time job. If a vendor's terms forbid automated access, I will tell you rather than route around it.
How do you deal with rate limits and vendor outages?
Requests go through a queue that respects the vendor's published limits rather than discovering them by getting blocked. On a failure the job retries with exponential backoff and jitter, so a recovering service is not hit by every client at once. Work that still will not go through lands in a dead-letter queue with its error, so it can be replayed once the vendor is back instead of being lost. For anything money-related I add reconciliation: a periodic comparison of both sides that catches silent divergence.
Where do my API keys and credentials live?
In your infrastructure, in a secrets manager or encrypted environment configuration, never in source control and never on my machine beyond the work itself. Each integration gets its own credential with the narrowest scope that does the job, so a leak is contained and can be rotated without taking everything else down. I document what each key can reach and how to rotate it, and where a vendor supports OAuth I use it rather than a long-lived key.
What happens when the vendor changes their API?
Breaking changes are normally announced with a deprecation window, so the practical defence is noticing the announcement. Integrations pin an API version where the vendor supports versioning, validate responses against an expected shape so an unexpected payload fails loudly rather than writing nonsense into your database, and alert on schema drift. Within the support window after delivery I handle vendor-side breakages as part of the engagement. After it, a small maintenance arrangement is usually cheaper than an emergency.
Connect your stack properly
Tell me which two systems refuse to talk to each other. That conversation is usually enough to scope the work.
Start with a free discovery call