API Development & Integration.
Interfaces other teams can build on without asking you questions.
Drema designs, builds and documents APIs, and integrates the third-party systems your product depends on. A good API is judged by whether an external developer can get to a successful first call without contacting you — so versioning, error semantics, authentication and documentation are treated as product features, not paperwork.
Interfaces other teams can build on without asking you questions.
What usually
goes wrong.
The API grew organically. Endpoints are inconsistent, errors return 200 with a message inside, there is no versioning so any change breaks a customer, rate limiting does not exist, and the documentation is a stale wiki page. Meanwhile each integration is bespoke and fails silently.
Everything that ships
with this work.
Not a menu to choose from. Each piece is here because leaving it out is what makes this kind of project fail six months later.
API design
Consistent resources, predictable naming, correct status codes and error bodies clients can act on programmatically.
Authentication and authorisation
API keys, OAuth or JWT with scoped permissions and a credential rotation path.
Versioning strategy
A way to evolve without breaking existing consumers, plus a deprecation policy people can plan around.
Rate limiting and quotas
Per-client limits with clear headers, protecting the platform and making fair use explicit.
Webhooks
Outbound events with signing, retries with backoff, and a redelivery mechanism for failures.
Documentation
An OpenAPI specification with worked examples and a genuine quickstart path.
The order matters more
than the tools.
Most of what separates a project that lands from one that stalls is sequence. This is the order we work in, and why each step comes where it does.
- 01
Design from the consumer
We write the calls a client would want to make before implementing anything behind them.
- 02
Specify
An OpenAPI contract agreed first, so front-end and integration work can proceed in parallel.
- 03
Implement with tests
Contract tests that fail when a response shape changes, which is what makes versioning trustworthy.
- 04
Protect
Auth, rate limits, input validation and abuse protection before exposure.
- 05
Document and launch
Reference plus quickstart, validated by someone integrating without help.
Where this gets
put to work.
The situations this service is built for. If one of these sounds like your problem it is worth a conversation — and if none of them do, say so on the call and we will point you at what would actually fit.
Public product APIs
Opening your platform to customers and partners as a differentiator.
Payment and finance integration
Gateways, reconciliation and idempotent handling of money movement.
Systems integration
Connecting CRM, ERP, support and marketing tools so records stop diverging.
Mobile and partner backends
A stable contract serving several clients from one source of truth.
Have a use case that is not on this list? That is usually the interesting one.
Chosen to fit,
not to impress.
We pick tools that suit the problem and that your team can maintain after we hand over — never to pad a capability list.
Questions we
get asked.
Straight answers, including the ones that talk you out of work we would otherwise be paid for.
REST or GraphQL?
REST for public APIs consumed by many unknown clients, because it is simpler to cache, document and rate limit. GraphQL where a first-party client needs flexible, deeply nested queries and you control both ends. Plenty of systems justify both, for different consumers.
How do you handle breaking changes?
By avoiding them where possible through additive design, and versioning where not. Consumers get a documented deprecation window and we monitor usage of old versions so retirement is based on evidence rather than a hopeful date.
Can you integrate with a legacy system with no API?
Usually, through database replicas, file exchange, scheduled extracts or screen-level automation as a last resort. We wrap whatever we find in a clean interface so the rest of your architecture is not contaminated by its constraints.
How do you deal with unreliable third-party APIs?
Assume failure and design for it: timeouts, retries with exponential backoff, circuit breakers, idempotency keys and queued processing so a partner outage degrades your product rather than breaking it.
Do you write the documentation?
Yes, and we treat it as part of the deliverable. Documentation is generated from the OpenAPI specification so it cannot drift from the implementation, with hand-written quickstarts on top.
What about payments and idempotency?
Any endpoint that moves money accepts an idempotency key so a retried request cannot double-charge. This is essential and frequently missing in systems we are asked to review.
Talk it through with a founder.
Bring the actual problem. You will get a straight answer on whether api development & integration is the right approach
— including when it is not.
