Canva launched its developer platform and SDK to empower a community of developers to meet the diverse design needs of its 185 million users.
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.
Canva uses a phased approach including internal releases and hackathons for dogfooding to gather feedback and improve APIs before a public launch.
The team initially prioritized speed by using manual processes and simple infrastructure, allowing them to focus on delivering APIs before investing in automated pipelines.
Canva defined three core app archetypes—creation, content, and AI-powered—to ruthlessly prioritize which APIs to build next and align the engineering teams.
APIs are designed as a long-term commitment guided by four principles: simplicity, safety, evolvability, and consistency to ensure a great developer experience.
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.
The journey highlights the importance of dogfooding, pragmatic excellence, avoiding poor APIs, and writing things down to gain clarity and scale effectively.
20:06Lucille Tachet
31:59Anu Bharadwaj
26:52Thomas Dohmke & Demetris Cheatham
30:15Dan Cranney
29:26Bastian Heilemann & Bruno Margula
14:29Madalena Costa
35:31Thomas Dohmke
27:43Anu Bharadwaj & Tobias Schlottke
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