Tutorial
Build on a contract you can trust
A good API is a contract: consistent, well-documented and stable. Here is how to start building against ours the right way.
You will get going fastest by handling the fundamentals well: authenticate once and reuse the token, read the shape of the responses, and plan for errors from the start rather than bolting them on.
What to expect
A clean integration is mostly about the unhappy paths
Anyone can call an API once; the craft is handling when it fails.
The first successful request feels like the finish line, but production is where the real work starts, expired tokens, rate limits, timeouts and the occasional malformed response.
This walkthrough covers authentication, then spends its energy on the parts that keep an integration alive: retries, error handling and staying resilient when the other side has a bad day.
What this guide covers
Authentication
Get authorized cleanly and keep tokens fresh.
Retries & backoff
Recover from transient failures without hammering the API.
Graceful errors
Handle the failures that production will inevitably send.
Getting started
The path
- 1
Authenticate
Get your credentials, request a token, and reuse it, don't re-authenticate on every call.
- 2
Make your first call
Start with a simple read to confirm everything is wired up before you build further.
- 3
Handle errors
Read the error responses and handle them gracefully, they tell you exactly what went wrong.
- 4
Build for change
Treat the API as a stable contract and version your integration so updates don't surprise you.
Deep dive
Integrations that survive the second year
Most integrations work on launch day; the interesting question is what they do eighteen months later when a provider changes a field, a token silently expires, or volume grows tenfold. We design for that day from the start.
Every external call gets a timeout, a retry budget and a dead-letter path. When the other side is down, and eventually it will be, work queues up instead of vanishing, and someone can see exactly what is waiting and why.
Version pinning plus a small anti-corruption layer keeps third-party quirks out of your core model. When the provider ships a breaking change, you update one adapter file instead of hunting through business logic.
Good to know
Common questions
We build software for teams who want their tools to fit the way they actually work — web, mobile, AI and the systems that tie them together. We write here about what we learn shipping it.