SDK Best Practices

The success of API-as-a-product companies is increasingly attributed to their Software Development Kits (SDKs) rather than the APIs themselves, as SDKs significantly enhance the developer experience by abstracting complex API interactions and providing type safety, improved product discoverability, and reduced support burdens. Despite the challenges in building robust SDKs, such as the long-tail of programming languages and maintaining SDK parity with evolving APIs, platforms like Speakeasy are emerging to streamline this process by offering tools to automatically generate and update SDKs across various languages. Essential qualities of a great SDK include type safety, abstraction of API internals, human readability, minimal dependencies, and enterprise features like retries and pagination, all of which are crucial for attracting developers and ensuring a sustainable developer ecosystem. As the primary interface for APIs, SDKs play a critical role in developer engagement, necessitating a strategic approach to their development and maintenance to keep pace with the proliferating languages and runtimes in production applications.