Flexibility and Adaptability in System Design

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Building a system with the right level of abstraction and flexibility is important, allowing for unexpected scenarios and various flavors of API interactions. Not making assumptions about standardization across APIs helps in accommodating asynchronous APIs and different interaction patterns. Using tools like temporal workflows can assist in managing asynchronous API operations and providing real-time updates for customers, catering to diverse use cases.

A common challenge for developers of SaaS products is integrating with existing services, including services that customers might already be using. For example, a SaaS product might need to integrate with customers using Salesforce, HubSpot, or another CRM system. However, this can be demanding for developers when 3rd party APIs are poorly documented or inconsistent.

Lauren Long is a co-founder at Ampersand which is a developer platform for SaaS integrations. She joins the show to talk about smoothing out API connectivity to make SaaS interoperable.

Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from information visualization to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is Head of Marketing and Developer Relations at Skyflow and host of the podcast Partially Redacted, a podcast about privacy and security engineering. You can connect with Sean on Twitter @seanfalconer.