Best Practices in SDK Development
Oct 8, 2025 ·
I gave this talk at Swift Leeds in October 2025, on best practices in SDK development, and how to create a great developer experience, both for your users and yourself.
Abstract
Modern software increasingly relies on open-source and commercial, closed-source libraries, yet creating a maintainable, developer-friendly SDK remains a challenge.
This talk delves into best practices that differentiate great SDKs from good ones, and explores many critical aspects of SDK development. We’ll look at how to design intuitive APIs and structure the API surface for discoverability, and how to create a system design that scales over time, with tests that ensure SDK and API reliability. We’ll also cover DocC, semantic versioning, and deprecations.
Whether you’re maintaining an existing SDK or planning a new one, you’ll walk away with insights to create SDKs that developers trust and enjoy using.
Images
I'm terribly bad at taking pictures while traveling, so if you do have any nice pictures of us together, feel free to send them my way.
Discussions & More
If you think this talk sounds interesting and want to book me for a conference or company event, please reach out on Bluesky or Mastodon, or send me an e-mail.