HubSpot Development - Where to begin...?

[Chris-Higgins]

Apologies if this has been covered previously...

I'm a long time HubSpot user / platinum partner, and I'm interested in learning more about the development side of HubSpot.  How to build custom integrations, leverage the APIs, create workflow web hooks, etc.  No specific use cases in mind, but I've had a couple of customers approach me recently asking about custom integrations, and I've had to turn them away.

I would in no circumstances consider myself a developer, but I can confidently write HTML / CSS, and I know the absolute bare minimum / basics of PHP.

Recognising that it may not be this simple, my question is which programming languages / skills do I need to / should I learn to be able to start understanding the topics above?  I'm happy to put the work in, but I'd like some guidance as to what exactly I should be researching / studying to be able to leverage the HubSpot platform more effectively for my customers.

Thanks!  😊

[cbarley10]

@Chris-Higgins , there's also an active community on Slack, which is great for questions about HubSpot apis/programming in general. I'd highly recommend joining if you havent already: https://designers.hubspot.com/slack

[WendyGoh]

Hi @Chris-Higgins,

I hope all is well with you 😄

This is a great question and I'll be happy to share with you some resources that I find helpful:

Custom integrations

This will depend what account are you looking to integrate HubSpot with. For a start, you can learn how to get your API key over in this documentation: Access your HubSpot API key and use the hapikey to try out some HubSpot endpoint such as Get all contacts | Contacts API.

Leveraging the APIs

To leverage on the APIs, you can use a simply rest client such as Postman or you can node.js to handle endpoints: Tutorial — Handling endpoints in Node.js and Express.

Create work web hooks

You can start by reading through our webhook documentation here: Webhooks API Overview and before playing around with it, you would need to set up a HubSpot App using the Oauth Flow. 

A great article that I'd love to share with you is this: What are Hubspot webhooks and why are they useful? - By

Additionally, if you're looking to build an app to handle endpoints, you could explore treehouse node.js tracks. If you're looking to just understand HubSpot APIs, run and test it, I'd say just go ahead and explore our API Overview and use postman to play around with it. 

I hope this helps to clarify and do let me know if there's any further questions on this!

[Chris-Higgins]

@WendyGoh @IsaacTakushi @cbarley10 

Where is the year going? I've had a note on my to-do list to jump back into this thread, but looks like I'm about a month overdue.  Apologies.

Thank-you all so much for your contributions and advice.  Full disclosure - I didn't really understand much of what you shared. But that's more to do with me than it is to do with your advice.  😂

I'm going to explore the resources you've all shared and find somewhere to start.  Looks like I've got a lot to learn!

Thanks again!

[IsaacTakushi]

Hey, @Chris-Higgins.

Your post made my day! We're lucky to have folks like you in our ecosystem.

For what it's worth, many developers also use PHP to interact with the HubSpot APIs.

If you know the basics, I'd encourage you to make some cURL requests to our endpoints. One of our customers even maintains a PHP library which should make the APIs more accessible.