Let’s be honest—API integration sounds simple. You send a request, you get a response, everyone’s happy. But in the real world, integrations aren’t that clean. They break. They scale. They evolve. And if you’re not thinking strategically from the start, you’ll end up with a mess of brittle endpoints, spaghetti code, and weekend outages you didn’t plan for.
After years of building and integrating APIs (and helping teams clean up their integration nightmares), I’ve seen the same mistakes pop up again and again. The good news? They’re all avoidable—with the right mindset, and the right tools.
Here are five common API integration mistakes I’ve run into—and how to dodge them like a pro.
This one’s a classic. You’re rushing to get an integration working, and before you know it, you’ve got an API key sitting in plain text and a URL hardcoded into your logic. It works… until it doesn’t. Suddenly you need to switch environments or rotate credentials, and now you’re digging through code or praying you didn’t push secrets to Git.
How to avoid it:
Use environment variables, config files, or secret management tools from the start. And if you're using a platform like Martini, you can centralize API connections and credential management without touching a single hardcoded string. You define them once, securely, and reuse them across flows. Simple, clean, and safe.
You’d be surprised how many integrations fail because the dev assumed the API would “just work.” Newsflash: it won’t. Network hiccups happen. APIs go down. Rate limits get hit. And without proper error handling or retry logic, even minor issues turn into user-facing failures.
How to avoid it:
Always build with the assumption that something will go wrong. Add retries with backoff, handle status codes gracefully, and log everything that matters. In Martini, error handling can be baked into the workflow logic. You can visually configure retries, catch exceptions, and route failures without resorting to tangled try/catch blocks.
Yes, we’re developers. Yes, we love to code. But sometimes, that love gets in the way. I’ve seen devs write hundreds of lines of glue code for something that could be done in five clicks with the right abstraction. Worse, that custom code becomes a black box—hard to debug, harder to maintain.
How to avoid it:
Before writing custom logic, ask yourself: Could this be done faster (and better) with a visual workflow or prebuilt connector? Platforms like Martini let you orchestrate APIs, map data, and automate workflows visually—and still let you drop in custom Java or Groovy when you actually need it. Best of both worlds.
APIs are messy. One returns camelCase, another screams in ALL_CAPS, and a third gives you nested objects wrapped in a list that makes no sense. If you just pass data from one API to another without normalization, good luck debugging that when the structure changes or your UI starts acting weird.
How to avoid it:
Introduce a normalization layer—map and transform data into a consistent format before it moves downstream. This isn’t just best practice—it’s survival. In Martini, data mapping is built-in. You can visually transform payloads across systems, apply logic, and ensure consistency without writing yet another transformation script.
This is the silent killer. You build your API and your integration in the same service, bundle them together, and deploy as one unit. Sounds efficient—until you need to change one without breaking the other. Or reuse logic elsewhere. Or scale them independently. Or troubleshoot where the hell the issue is.
How to avoid it:
Separate concerns. APIs should expose functionality. Integrations should orchestrate flows. Keep them modular. With Lonti’s stack, this is easy—use Negroni to design reusable data models and deploy them as standalone APIs. Use Martini to orchestrate those APIs and automate the logic. Use Bellini to build interfaces that connect to them all. Decoupled. Maintainable. Scalable.
API integration doesn’t have to be painful—but it does require discipline. A few smart choices early on can save you days (or weeks) down the line. And if you're using the right tools, you don’t have to trade speed for stability.
At Lonti, we built our products with these mistakes in mind—because we made them too. Martini, Negroni, and Bellini are designed to help developers like us build integrations that last. No duct tape. No dead ends. Just clean, scalable, API-first development.
So if you’re still hardcoding keys or gluing together brittle services—stop. There’s a better way.
Low code. No limits. And no more integration nightmares.