API Development

Business problems

• Mobile, dashboard and partners each talking to a different backend, so the same business rule — a discount, a permission check — gets implemented three times and drifts.
• An API with no versioning strategy, so every client is permanently one deploy away from breaking.
• An API with no rate limiting at all, so one misbehaving client or a retry loop from a partner integration can take down the backend for everyone.
• Authentication logic duplicated across endpoints instead of centralized, so a security fix has to be applied in a dozen places and inevitably misses one.
• No staging or sandbox environment for partners to test against, so a partner's first integration attempt happens directly against production data.
• No consistent naming or shape convention across endpoints, so a client has to learn a slightly different pattern for every resource instead of one pattern that holds everywhere.
• Long-lived API keys with no expiry or scope restriction, so a single leaked key grants full access indefinitely instead of a narrow, time-limited one.

Development process

1. Resources, auth, errors, versioning — a contract other teams can keep, documented well enough that a new consumer does not need a call to figure out how to use it.
2. Design the error and pagination shapes once, up front, so every new endpoint follows the same pattern instead of inventing its own.
3. Centralize authentication and authorization in middleware, not in each controller, so a permission rule is defined once and applied consistently everywhere.
4. Add rate limiting and request logging from the start, so a traffic spike or an abusive client is visible and throttled instead of taking the API down.
5. Provide a sandbox environment with realistic test data, so a partner can build and test an integration without touching production.
6. Pick one naming and response-shape convention for the whole API on day one, and apply it to every endpoint that follows, so a new resource is predictable before its documentation is even read.

What you get

• One API for web and mobile that stays stable as the product grows, so a mobile release does not have to ship in lockstep with every backend change.
• Partners and internal teams building against the same documented contract instead of reverse-engineering behavior from a Postman collection someone forwarded once.
• An API that survives a traffic spike or a misbehaving client instead of going down with it.
• Security fixes applied once, in middleware, instead of chased across a dozen endpoints hoping none were missed.
• Partners who can build and test against a sandbox instead of experimenting directly against production data.
• New endpoints that feel familiar the moment a client sees them, because they follow the same convention as everything else in the API.
• API keys scoped to exactly what an integration needs and nothing more, so a leak is a contained incident instead of a full compromise.
• Fewer integration bugs reported by partners, because the API behaves the same way in every corner instead of surprising them in the one endpoint nobody tested carefully.

Selected projects