🔍 Third-Party Integrations — Because Real APIs Are Never That Simple

As developers, we love documentation.

But what happens when you work with multiple third-party partners, and only some of them even have docs?

At Stylework, I’ve had to integrate our system with various coworking space providers — each with their own quirks, limitations, and surprises.

This post shares my story of how I reverse-engineered partner APIs and built a stable system out of chaos.

🧩 The Reality of Third-Party APIs

Let’s break the illusion first — working with partners in the real world looked like this:

❌ Inconsistent or Missing Documentation

  • Some partners had API docs.
  • Some didn’t.
  • Some sent Google Sheets instead 🤯

I had to inspect frontend requests, intercept traffic, or just guess request payloads.

❌ Different Booking Flows

  • Some partners had a well-defined slot & booking process.
  • Others had no clear process — just a “make it work” attitude.

I had to reconstruct business logic based on scattered clues.

❌ No Dashboard Visibility

  • Some partners had dashboards where we could verify bookings.
  • Others? Nothing. Just a blind call-and-hope approach.

This made debugging 10x harder. We built internal logging and test harnesses to simulate every step.

❌ IP Whitelisting & Security Blocks

  • Some APIs blocked all IPs by default.
  • We had to request whitelisting for each environment (local, staging, prod).
  • Others had open endpoints with zero security 😅

Every integration had different auth rules — from basic tokens to custom headers.

❌ Architecture Differences

  • One API sent all available slots for a workspace.
  • Another sent one slot at a time per date.
  • A third stored everything as open/close timings.

We had to write custom adapter logic for each architecture.

❌ Booking Confirmations? Maybe.

  • Some sent confirmation emails after a booking.
  • Some didn’t.
  • Some just reflected the change silently on a dashboard.

We couldn’t rely on notifications — so we wrote webhook fallbacks.

🔧 My Go-To Tactics for Reverse Engineering

Here’s what helped me survive and succeed:

  • 🛠 Use Postman & DevTools to watch real-time requests
  • 📄 Compare success vs failure payloads to learn edge cases
  • 🧪 Mock APIs when partners are unresponsive
  • 🧰 Create abstraction layers so the rest of our codebase doesn’t suffer
  • 📝 Log everything — especially partner-side responses
  • 💬 Communicate proactively with partners, even if they’re not technical

💬 Final Thought

Reverse engineering third-party APIs is messy, frustrating, and unpredictable.

But if you learn to:

  • Think like a debugger
  • Adapt to inconsistency
  • Write flexible integration layers

You’ll unlock a superpower that’s rarely taught, but always needed.

🔁 Your Turn

Have you ever worked with APIs that made you scream internally? 😅

Share your integration war stories in the comments 👇 — I’d love to hear them.

🧑‍💻 Author: Prafulla Agarwal

💼 Full-Stack Developer | Node.js • Angular • DevOps

📍 Currently building real-time systems @Stylework