Modern Guide to Building SDKs
Learn the role SDKs play in Stripe’s developer experience and how a Fortune 250 Fintech reduced developer onboarding and integration times.
- How do SDKs increase developer productivity?
- What developers expect from modern SDKs
- Best practices for building an SDK program
- Team and skills required for building SDKs
- Comparison: hand coded vs code generation
- Advice on the best approach for your API
What are SDKs?
SDKs, software development kits, are built by API providers to help developers more easily consume their API. SDKs include a code library written in a specific programming language like Java, Python, Go, Ruby, TypeScript, PHP, C# etc. and abstracts away complex authentication, performs data validation and serialization, handles errors, logging, retries and more
SDKs are sometimes viewed as just a code library, but they are much more than that. SDKs include documentation, getting started guides, code samples, use case guides and sample applications.
Signs your API needs modern SDKs
- Time to first “hello world” lagging
- Integration launch deadlines missed
- Support time consumed in basic authentication questions
- Difficulty in troubleshooting code level problems
- Developers requiring guidance on common use cases
- Developers requesting SDKs and code samples
- Enterprise deals lost due to lack of SDKs
- Incomplete community-built client libraries
- Losing developers to the competition
