How we approach API development differently
Most integration projects fail not from technical complexity but from mismatched expectations. A client needs their application to communicate with a payment processor. Simple enough. Then you discover the processor's documentation hasn't been updated in two years, their sandbox environment behaves differently from production, and their rate limits aren't documented anywhere.
We've learned to anticipate these gaps. Before writing a single line of code, we map out the failure scenarios. What happens when the third-party service goes down? How do we handle partial responses? Where does retry logic make sense versus immediately failing?
