APIs · Webhooks · Integrations
Connecting the systems your business already runs on. Reading from them, writing back to them, and holding the whole thing together when tokens expire and the other end goes quiet. We run two live integrations of our own against a platform we do not control.
Nobody rings up wanting an API integration. They ring up because one of these is happening.
Orders in one place, stock in another, and somebody re-keying between them every morning before they can start their real job. The integration is usually smaller than the workaround it replaces, and it stops being anyone's daily chore.
Your customers already use something. A fitness platform, an accounting package, a booking system. You want to add to it rather than ask them to move house. That means connecting to an API you do not control, on their terms.
Readings, transactions or activity records turning up one at a time, with no way to see the pattern across the lot of them. Turning that stream into something a person can act on is the actual work.
Tokens expire. Rate limits get hit. The other end goes down mid-request, and a duplicate event turns up twice for good measure. Integrations mostly fail at the edges, and the edges are the bit we build for.
Ours, running live, and a fair demonstration of what an integration has to survive.
Worked example
SeaSwims.Club
Swimmers already record their swims on a fitness platform. The site connects to that platform, reads each swim as it gets uploaded, and adds what the swimmer's watch could not measure. Sea temperature, wind, swell and tide at that beach at that moment.
On its own that is just a nicer swim record. Pooled across everybody, it becomes a crowd-sourced sea temperature history for the coastline. A genuine environmental dataset, put together out of swims that were happening anyway.
The demo is the easy part. These six are what separate something that runs for years from something that quietly stopped last March.
Live
since 2023
Two production integrations running against the Strava API, continuously. Reading activities as they get uploaded, and writing back to them.
Webhooks,
not polling
The platform tells us when something happens instead of us asking every few minutes. Fewer calls, no rate-limit ceiling to worry about, and data that is current rather than up to a quarter of an hour old.
1,000/day
budget, respected
The API allows a fixed number of calls a day. Enrichment is designed so most of the work happens without spending one, which is why the ceiling has never been the thing holding us up.
Two APIs
joined per record
Each swim gets matched against a keyless marine and weather service, so a raw activity turns into water temperature, wind, swell and tide at that spot at that moment.
Connecting to other people's systems, and building the ones other people connect to.
A defined way for one system to ask another for something, or tell it something, with no person in between. If two pieces of software in your business are kept in step by somebody copying between them, that is usually a job an API can do instead.
Usually, if they publish an API, and most large platforms do. What we can do is bounded by what they allow, so the first step is always reading their terms and their limits. We would rather tell you early that something is not permitted than find out late and bill you for the discovery.
It will. We validate everything arriving rather than assuming it is well formed, so a change usually surfaces as a logged warning instead of a broken page. Integrations need the occasional bit of maintenance, and we would rather set that expectation up front than pretend otherwise.
Credentials stay on the server and never reach the browser. Access gets checked on the server for every request rather than assumed from what the interface is showing. Where members connect their own accounts, disconnecting genuinely removes the connection at both ends.
More than it sounds. Polling means asking over and over whether anything has changed, which burns your API budget and leaves the data stale between checks. A webhook means being told the moment it happens. Where a platform offers webhooks, we use them.
A straightforward one-way sync can be a couple of weeks. Something with member authentication, webhooks, billing and enrichment is more like two to three months. The variable is rarely the coding. It is how well the other end is documented.
The best integrations usually start life as somebody's manual routine. Tell us which two systems are out of step and who is keeping them in line by hand. That is normally enough for us to say what it would take to stop.
