Lessons learned from building an infrastructure devtool

Summary

Three years ago, we started Nango: Developer infrastructure for product integrations.Today, it powers integrations with 500+ APIs for hundreds of SaaS and AI companies.Our journey to get here was anything but linear.For this post we gathered some of our most unexpected lessons learned. We hope they help other teams who are also building developer infrastructure products.1. Great abstractions are the key to great infrastructure productsAs developer infrastructure, our abstractions are our product.For instance, the interface we choose to let your app authenticate with 500+ APIs defines what we handle, the available configuration options, and how you can integrate this feature in your own application. Different abstractions lead to very different experiences.For Nango, our abstractions must be powerful enough to solve a real problem end-to-end, yet flexible enough to accommodate diverse use cases, external APIs, and tech stacks.In our experience, when you get the abstractions right, everything else falls into place: Tools fit like a glove, APIs make intuitive sense, and configuration options cover exactly what customers want to tune.Building great abstractions has an element of craft, and you can see it in the tools engineers love: Linear for project management, Vercel for running apps, Supabase for full-stack products, Knock for notifications, Resend for emails, and Infisical for secrets management.I don't think this is a coincidence. Deep domain expertise and best practices help create abstractions that truly fit. But the final touches, such as great API design, intuitive property names, and just the right amount of configuration, are more art than science.2. To build great abstractions, you need deep expertiseInfrastructure is the foundation others build on. If you're not truly an expert in your space, users feel it immediately: abstractions are off, "obvious" features are missing, and support lacks depth.When we started Nango, we had already built dozens of integra...