When writing networking code, you want to make sure the code between the client and server implementation is consistent. After spending hours defining the APIs with your backend engineers, you’ll probably need to spend even more time implementing those details over to your code (and guess what… your backend engineers will be doing the same!). This process is boring, time consuming, and prone to errors.

Wouldn’t it be cool if this process were automated? If you could have classes and interfaces that mirror your API definition? And if they were automatically tested and ready to use out of the box?

It can be done! At Yelp, we define our APIs using Swagger Specs and we successfully automated the generation of our networking code for both servers and clients (iOS & Android). On Android, we generate Kotlin Data Classes and Retrofit APIs that mirror our spec files and are ready to use for all engineers. In this talk, we will explore how we set up our code generation pipeline and how you can start doing it, too.