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Creating an SDK - Lessons Learned

Ed Leafe (Rackspace)
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It has been said that the only way to really grow as a developer is to make mistakes, but only as long as you learn from them. By that standard, the process of creating an SDK that wraps a set of complex APIs such as the ones that OpenStack provides has helped me grow by leaps and bounds, because I sure made my share of mistakes in the process of creating pyrax, the Python SDK for OpenStack clouds. In this talk I will recount several of these mistakes, along with the insights gained from them, in the hope that sharing these will help other developer avoid similar problems.

And while many of these mistakes were of a technical nature, some were also more political in nature. Developers like to think that their success depends on their technical skills, but we sometimes make our lives more difficult by ignoring the political side of the development process, both inside our companies and also in the larger open source communities. Awareness of these sorts of problems can help anyone working within a community to be much more effective in their projects.

Ed Leafe

