For people who make APIs, it is easy to focus on your API as your “product”, but in reality an end user’s experience is in fact defined by whatever they can pull down from their favorite language’s package manager. As a developer, writing your own library to use someone’s API is rarely desirable, especially if there is another API that you could use with the same functionality and a library in your language. But how is an API provider supposed to build these SDKs in a scalable way so that they aren’t crushed by the maintenance burden of future API developments? This talk will cover a few of the common strategies:

• Building an open source community to help with your SDKs
• Scaling the team in proportion to your SDK desires
• Using tools to generate your client libraries from a specification and dive deeper into the last one.