Treblle API Talks is a series of interviews we did with our users. We talk about APIs in general, API observability and how Treblle helps them gain much needed context on how their API is performing.
How a developer agency uses API Observability to help them be a top 1000 worldwide Clutch company
We recently talked to Nikola Meheš, a Frontend Team Lead with some responsibilities as a Tech Lead at Cinnamon Agency.
You actually heard about Cinnamon? We’re not surprised. They have just recently been recognized as one of the top developer agencies.
Nikola has been working at Cinnamon for the past 2.5 years and he had some great insights about the industry, development, and of course, APIs and who actually is using them the most.
All software, zero bullshit
This is the Cinnamon tagline, and we like it a lot. You can easily find all you want about Cinnamon on their LinkedIn page or on their website. Here are some highlights.
- Member of TOP 7% Verified members of Pangea Community since 2021
- Part of the 1000 top worldwide companies by Clutch 2021
- Largest Flutter team in the Region
- Number one Flutter Development firm in Croatia by Clutch 2021
- Number one Flutter Development firm in Croatia by The Manifest 2021
Cinnamon agency is a software company that consists of an international team of 100+ innovators working with clients in 20 different countries and across countless industries. From inspirational not-for-profits to hyper-growth FinTechs, their clients are making an impact thanks to their software solutions.
Their work is used by more than 60M people worldwide.
Pretty awesome that Treblle is becoming a part of their story as a tool.
What kind of projects use APIs
Although many of Cinnamons’ projects are under NDA, we did get some useful insights about what kind of projects are usually using the API-first approach.
Cinnamon has a uniquely individual approach to every project where you can simply just have an idea. They will organize a workshop with their designers and developers to figure out how to build a product from and then give you an estimate on the price and time needed to finish the project for your idea.
“When it comes to smaller companies that have a need for an app, we usually use Firebase alongside Flutter, since we have a very strong Flutter team and we know all the ins&outs of Firebase." Nikola explained.
APIs are something they work with on medium-sized and especially big projects.
“We currently have some big projects where we use APIs. Most are commercial projects, so software that is aimed at a large global audience, we have some fintech projects and there’s also one a bit smaller but really interesting. We are digitalizing the cockpits of older small planes (Cessna planes from the 60s).”
How to solve the visibility and observability problems with APIs
“Mostly what you want to be aware of are the problems. You need to be able to locate them and solve them quickly. This is where Treblle helps us and why it is becoming a standard tool in our development.”
Nikola then gave us a great real example of a problem they had where API observability was an essential need for his team to be able to figure out what went wrong.
“We had a problem on our backend side. We were doing integration with Okta and Stripe. For some reason, there were way more requests going out to the APIs than necessary.
When we were developing it, in theory, it all seemed logical and sound. Because of security, it was logical to ask for validations, however, the requests for validations kept going out constantly.
In the testing phase, we saw that the app took a lot of time to load and was seriously too slow.
Without Treblle, this means we have to go into research mode. We went to the AWS logs, but in all honesty, those really don’t tell you much. We spent a lot of time on just locating the endpoints that were set up as they were supposed to be and then those that are not, that was let's say - over-engineered.”
Treblle helps with providing us with the exact time this happened and the places where this was coming from.
This is what we wanted to hear. Well, not that they are having problems and spending a lot of time and resources. It was nice to hear we have a product that solves real problems for developers on real (and big) projects.
With Treblle, they are now able to detect these endpoints almost immediately, because Treblle automatically detects them.
That in combination with the Treblle dashboard that shows you the requests with all the context in real-time is a winning combination for a developer agency. They can now produce MVP products more efficiently and way faster, with time spent more on the quality than on research and debugging.
All that being the case, Nikola and his Cinnamon team are also utilizing the power of Treblle to see how much traffic is happening on the server. It’s a great way to get an insight into when the spikes in traffic are happening for their clients.
“Some of our clients have spikes of users, and those are really hard to predict and detect because they happen in a really short window of time. Treblle helps with providing us with the exact time this happened and the places where this was coming from. It might even be a great way to detect if someone is actually trying to do something harmful.”
One of Treblle’s many features, as you may already know, is that it automatically detects your endpoints. It was great to see it being utilized by an agency like Cinnamon.
“Yup! The endpoint detection feature really helped us. We were able to easily locate endpoints that were left on the to-do-list, while we were still in the development phase.”
In conclusion
We always suspected that Treblle might be a great tool for developer agencies. Our founders Vedran and Darko were essentially running one for 10+ years, and Treblle was basically built in-house to help themselves.
Nikola and Cinnamon just confirmed our suspicions and we have a hunch that more and more agencies will be using Treblle as an essential part of their tooling.
Stay tuned for more API talks by subscribing to our Blog. Until next time, like always,
Stay in tune with your APIs.
