Sprint 127 was a milestone sprint for CardTechie - we officially shipped Trading Card API v0.4.0, marking a major step toward making comprehensive trading card data accessible to developers everywhere.
What We Shipped This Sprint
🚀 Trading Card API v0.4.0 - Production Ready Features
The big news: Trading Card API v0.4.0 is live with enterprise-grade capabilities that make it ready for serious applications.
New Enterprise Features:
- Smart Rate Limiting: Redis-backed rate limiting with OAuth-aware intelligence - authenticated users get higher limits
- Usage Analytics: Built-in API usage logging to help both developers and us understand consumption patterns
- Enhanced Security: Comprehensive rate limiting on OAuth endpoints and improved authentication flows
- Better Developer Experience: Streamlined documentation, faster CI/CD, and cleaner API responses
đź“ť Community Building Through Content
We published three strategic posts this sprint:
- Introducing tradingcardapi.com: The Trading Card API Finally Has a Home - Finally gave our API a proper home with comprehensive documentation
- The Data Problem Every Card App Faces - Explored why trading card data is uniquely challenging and how we're solving it
- Sprint 126 Recap - Started our tradition of building in public by sharing our development process
⚙️ Behind-the-Scenes Infrastructure Work
While not glamorous, we made significant improvements to our development workflow:
- Automated version management and release processes
- Fixed critical CI/CD timing issues that were slowing development
- Optimized documentation generation to reduce unnecessary rebuilds
- Deprecated legacy API routes to clean up our codebase
Why This Release Matters
Trading Card API v0.4.0 represents a shift from "API that works" to "API you can build a business on." The rate limiting and usage analytics give us the foundation to support both hobbyist developers and enterprise customers.
The smart rate limiting is particularly exciting - it automatically gives authenticated developers higher limits, encouraging proper API integration while protecting our infrastructure.
What's Next
With v0.4.0 shipped, we're turning our attention to:
- Community Building: Reaching out to developers who could benefit from structured trading card data
- Data Expansion: Adding more card sets and improving data quality based on user feedback
- Partnership Opportunities: Exploring integrations with existing card platforms and marketplaces
The Bigger Picture
Every sprint brings us closer to our vision: making trading card data as accessible and standardized as weather data or stock prices.
The trading card industry has exploded in recent years, but developers still struggle with fragmented, inconsistent data sources. We're building the infrastructure layer that lets innovative applications flourish.
Want to follow our journey? Check out our API documentation or reach out if you're building something cool with trading card data.
Josh Harrison is the founder of CardTechie and a software engineering manager with over 20 years of experience building scalable applications. As a lifelong trading card collector and developer, he's experienced both sides of the data problem firsthand—spending countless hours manually entering card information as a collector, and facing the challenge of sourcing reliable card data as a developer. Josh is currently working on solutions to make trading card data more accessible and interoperable across the ecosystem. Follow his work at