API developer experience: polishing your API’s public interface

Developer experience is a buzz word and so it’s prone to hyperbole. It’s not the end all be all that some people on social make it out to be. Nor is it irrelevant like some detractors claim. It is one of many important aspects of building an API (or any developer product).

It’s the final coat of polish that makes your product easily usable by the developer community. Done well, it can be the difference between winning and losing an RFP, between a successful and unsuccessful PLG motion.

For an understanding of the impact great developer experience can have, let’s take a look at Stripe, the canonical example company that wrote the playbook.

What Stripe got right: A case study in API excellence

Stripe’s (opens in a new tab) API sets the gold standard for developer experience because it makes life easy for developers at every touchpoint. In 2011, Stripe was the first to offer an API-first approach to payments, and its evident in the number of startups that have popped up aiming to be the “Stripe for X”.

Let’s take a look at what Stripe does right.

SDK libraries

No one wants to manually write API requests from scratch. Providing well-maintained SDKs in popular programming languages like Python, JavaScript, and Go can save developers countless hours of having to write boilerplate code for your API.

Because SDKs are written in the language you’re targeting, they can be more idiomatic when it comes to type safety. An SDK also makes it easier to predict how an API will respond to a request since the response object is typed.

Stripe offers well-maintained SDKs for major programming languages and frameworks, making it easy to integrate payments without having to reinvent the wheel.

For example, here’s how to create a payment intent using Stripe’s Python SDK compared to making a raw API request:

stripe_sdk_example.py

import stripe

stripe.api_key = "sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc"

intent = stripe.PaymentIntent.create(
    amount=1000,
    currency="usd",
    payment_method_types=["card"],
)

stripe_api_example.py

import requests

url = "https://api.stripe.com/v1/payment_intents"
headers = {
  "Authorization": "Bearer sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc"
}
data = {
  "amount": 1000,
  "currency": "usd",
  "payment_method_types": ["card"]
}
response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=data)
print(response.json())

Sandbox environments for testing

Experimenting is the easiest way to find your way around a tool. With sandboxes, developers can test their integrations without worrying about rate limits, API call costs, or breaking anything.

Stripe makes it effortless by providing sandbox environments (opens in a new tab) that mirror production. This allows teams to simulate real-world scenarios without touching real money.

Offer developer-first documentation

Stripe nailed documentation by making it more than just a reference guide. Their documentation isn’t just a manual — it’s an experience.

With clear, concise explanations, real-world examples, and interactive API explorers, developers can go from zero to functional in minutes. The Stripe docs offer code snippets in multiple languages, ensuring that whether you’re using Python, Node.js, or Ruby, you have a starting point. To complete the loop, the code snippets reference the Stripe SDKs for the different languages.

For example, need to process a payment? Stripe provides a simple copy-paste code snippet that works right out of the box:

import stripe

stripe.api_key = "sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc"

charge = stripe.Charge.create(
    amount=2000,
    currency="usd",
    source="tok_visa",
    description="Charge for test@example.com"
)

How to make your API like Stripe

Here are some strategies to ensure your API is not just functional but feels intuitive, reduces friction, and empowers developers to achieve their goals quickly and effectively.

Understand your users’ needs

Different APIs serve different user bases. For instance, a payments API like Stripe caters to a different audience compared to Spotify’s API for music data. An enterprise team integrating a merchant payments API will have different needs than a solo developer building a music app with a single pricing tier.

Understanding your audience is the first step to creating an API that meets their needs - and keeping it stable for them over time. Enterprise teams need long-term consistency with clear versioning, while solo developers need flexibility without unexpected breaking changes.

Make onboarding and authentication frictionless

The difference between a good and bad API often comes down to onboarding. Just ask @levelsio (opens in a new tab), who compared xAI and Google Gemini’s APIs:

While xAI needed only an API key, Google Gemini required multiple sign-ups, portal logins, and complex installation steps. For enterprise teams, inconsistent authentication across endpoints or juggling multiple keys can be equally frustrating.

The solution? Provide simple API key authentication where possible:

# Simple API key authentication
import requests
headers = {"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"}
response = requests.get("https://api.example.com/data", headers=headers)
print(response.json())

Provide tooling that fits your developers’ workflows

A great API should integrate seamlessly into developers’ existing workflows and tools. Start with a virtual testing environment where developers can experiment safely without affecting production data. Including a Run in Postman button lets developers instantly import your API collection and start testing with minimal setup. Well-maintained SDKs that are regularly updated based on developer feedback complete the toolkit.

Add type safety features that enterprise teams need - strongly typed responses and request validation help prevent runtime errors and make integration more reliable.

By offering these tools and maintaining them diligently, you’re meeting developers where they are, reducing set-up friction, and allowing them to integrate your API into their existing workflows effortlessly.

Make your API self-service

Developers don’t want to jump through hoops to get started. The entire process from onboarding to key generation and integration should be self-service. Clear, public documentation and interactive playgrounds help developers explore your API without needing support.

The key to a smooth self-service experience is continuous improvement. Update your documentation based on developer feedback, add examples for common use cases as you discover them, and keep changelog entries clear and accessible. When breaking changes are unavoidable, provide comprehensive migration guides that walk developers through the transition.

Enterprise teams especially benefit from comprehensive guides that help them navigate compliance requirements and security implementations.

Keep your API stable and reliable

Stability is the foundation of trust between you and your developers. If your API is constantly changing, developers will lose confidence in your platform since they can’t rely on it to work consistently. Preserve backward compatibility whenever possible, and when breaking changes are needed, provide clear migration paths. Quick bug fixes show developers you value their time and trust in your platform.

Reliability means different things to different users. Enterprise teams need clear rate limits, consistent error messages, and long deprecation notices. Solo developers need quick bug fixes and responsive support. Document your rate limits clearly and provide status pages that show real-time API health.

Version your API thoughtfully. When breaking changes are unavoidable, maintain support for older versions during a reasonable transition period. Stay connected to your developer community through support channels, documentation surveys, and forums — their feedback is your roadmap to improvement.

Think of your dashboard as more than just a control panel, it’s a trust-building platform that gives developers confidence in your API’s reliability and your commitment to their success.

Above all: Choose boring technology (it works)

The foundation of great developer experience is a well-designed, intuitive API. No amount of documentation or tooling can compensate for an overcomplicated API design.

REST is almost always the right choice for your API. While alternatives like GraphQL (opens in a new tab) offer powerful features, they also introduce complexity that most applications don’t need. Unless you have a specific use case that demands more flexibility, stick with REST - it’s well-understood, widely supported, and gets the job done.

Remember, you probably don’t need the engineering patterns used by tech giants (opens in a new tab). Start simple, and only add complexity when your actual usage demands it. Your goal is to make life easier for developers, not to implement the latest architectural patterns.

However, sometimes, breaking conventions can dramatically improve developer experience. Discord’s Rich Presence API is a great example:

Instead of REST, they use RPC for real-time updates about user activity:

# using https://github.com/Senophyx/Discord-RPC

import discordrpc

rpc = discordrpc.RPC(app_id=<your_app_id>)

rpc.set_activity(
  state="`Coding`",
  details="Building a new API",
)

rpc.run()

This deviation from REST makes sense because it solves a specific problem - real-time status updates - in a way that’s both powerful and easy to implement. The key is that Discord broke convention to improve developer experience, not just to be different.

Let’s say an indie developer is building a game and wants to show the player’s current status in Discord. In this case, using RPC makes more sense than REST because it’s real-time and doesn’t require polling. If Discord had stuck with REST, developers would have had to poll the API every few seconds to get the same functionality, which would be inefficient and annoying.

The lesson? Keep it simple by default, but don’t be afraid to break conventions when it genuinely makes life easier for your developers.

Final thoughts

Building an API that developers love isn’t about following every trend or implementing complex architectures. It’s about understanding your users, making practical design decisions, and providing useful tools to help them build.

By following these principles, you’ll create an API that developers actually want to use, leading to faster adoption and fewer support headaches.