How to CODE: Simplifying the Developer Experience with HubSpot

Developers don’t come to HubSpot asking for a tool. They come with a customer problem to solve. In our early days, they would meet documentation that explained how an API works, but not when or why to choose it. This post is about how we simplified HubSpot’s developer onboarding experience with CODE: The Center of Developer Excellence.

Every developer platform faces the same challenge: how do you help developers succeed without overwhelming them?

The traditional answer has been comprehensive documentation. Build more APIs, document every endpoint, explain every parameter, and let developers figure out the rest.

At HubSpot, we've found that comprehensiveness isn't the same as helpful. When developers arrive with a specific problem, like syncing customer data between their app and HubSpot, they don't want a tour of every possible API. They want to solve their problem and they want to solve it right. 

Comprehensive Documentation vs Decision Paralysis

In the early days of building our documentation, no matter how thorough, we were still leaving developers to connect the dots between "what's possible" and "what's practical." We realized we weren't just documenting tools, we were accidentally creating decision paralysis.

This realization sparked a fundamental shift in how we approach developer experience at HubSpot. We stopped asking "How can we document this better?" and started asking "How can we guide developers more intentionally?"

The answer wasn't better documentation. It was opinionated guidance.

Why Opinionated Platforms Win

Here’s the counterintuitive truth about developer experience: constraints can be liberating. 

When you remove the burden of making architectural decisions about unfamiliar systems, developers can focus on what they do best: solving their business problems.

At HubSpot, we believe most developers don't want to think deeply about platform-specific architectural decisions. They want those decisions made by people who understand the platform extensively, so they can focus on their application logic.

Enter CODE: Opinionated by Design

We decided to shift our focus from explaining what's possible to recommending what works. We studied the successful approaches that developers were already using, and began making those paths obvious from day one. 

That's where CODE, our Center of Developer Excellence, comes in.

CODE is our first concrete expression of this philosophy. It’s a set of opinionated patterns that start with real developer problems and provide clear guidance on how to solve them on the HubSpot platform. 

Think of it like that friend you go to for restaurant recommendations. The one who doesn't just send you a list of every restaurant in the city, but tells you exactly where to go and what to order!

CODE makes it simple to get started with HubSpot's developer platform by providing a wealth of resources, examples, and best practices tailored to your specific use cases. Our Backend Sync pattern shows developers exactly which APIs to use for bidirectional data flow, eliminating the guesswork of choosing between CRM objects, webhooks, or custom objects.

By taking strong positions on how common patterns should be implemented,  this frees developers from having to become HubSpot API experts before they can build anything useful. 

When to use Hubspot DOCS vs CODE

Conclusion

We're moving from a platform that says "here's everything you can do" to one that says "here's how to do what you want to do, really well."

CODE represents the first major milestone in HubSpot's unified developer platform strategy. Our Product teams continue to build APIs with these patterns in mind, while our Technical Consulting teams leverage CODE as a training resource and a reference guide to help HubSpotters improve their coding skills.

As we continue investing in our Get Started experience, CODE's opinionated patterns will integrate with our upcoming developer onboarding flows, AI-assisted code generation, and streamlined authentication systems. 

Our goal is a cohesive developer journey where every touchpoint, from the first API call to production deployment, feels intentionally designed rather than accidentally complex.

We're not trying to give developers more choices. We're trying to give them better choices. 

Acknowledgements

Written in collaboration with HubSpot Developer Relations team members Zack Wolfson, Chris Riley, and Ashley B Webster.