Anto Lepejian
Insights from building the Canva Developers Platform to empower 185 million designers
#1about 3 minutes
Introducing the Canva Developers Platform and SDK
Canva launched its developer platform and SDK to empower a community of developers to meet the diverse design needs of its 185 million users.
#2about 3 minutes
Understanding the architecture of the Canva Apps SDK
The SDK uses a sandboxed iframe and a message bus to communicate with an API controller, which acts as an anti-corruption layer to decouple public APIs from internal product code.
#3about 3 minutes
Using internal hackathons and feedback to build APIs
Canva uses a phased approach including internal releases and hackathons for dogfooding to gather feedback and improve APIs before a public launch.
#4about 4 minutes
Starting small with a pragmatic engineering approach
The team initially prioritized speed by using manual processes and simple infrastructure, allowing them to focus on delivering APIs before investing in automated pipelines.
#5about 3 minutes
Prioritizing API development with app archetypes
Canva defined three core app archetypes—creation, content, and AI-powered—to ruthlessly prioritize which APIs to build next and align the engineering teams.
#6about 4 minutes
Following four core principles for outstanding API design
APIs are designed as a long-term commitment guided by four principles: simplicity, safety, evolvability, and consistency to ensure a great developer experience.
#7about 3 minutes
Ensuring API consistency with a design working group
An API design working group, run sheets, and a shared engineering handbook help maintain consistency and alignment across independent teams, avoiding the pitfalls of Conway's Law.
#8about 2 minutes
Key lessons learned from building a developer platform
The journey highlights the importance of dogfooding, pragmatic excellence, avoiding poor APIs, and writing things down to gain clarity and scale effectively.
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