I wanted to share my build process in case it's useful for anyone learning to ship production APIs.

Over the past few months I built a portfolio of 29 live APIs for trading bots and AI agents. Here's the exact stack and process I used:

Stack:

• TypeScript + Express
• ts-node-dev for development
• Render free tier for hosting
• Claude AI for reasoning layers
• OrbisAPI for distribution and monetization

Build pattern I follow every time:

1. Create GitHub repo with description
2. Open Codespace
3. Write one setup.sh heredoc script that creates all files
4. Run bash setup.sh
5. npm install && npm run dev
6. Test with curl
7. Commit, deploy to Render
8. List on OrbisAPI

Every API has the same structure:

src/
  routes/        — express routers
  services/      — business logic
  middleware/    — logger, rate limiter
  types/         — TypeScript interfaces

Things I learned:

• Never use pino-pretty in Codespaces — it causes hanging. Use plain console.log
• Always use node dist/index.js as start command, not ts-node
• render.yaml makes deployment repeatable
• Joi for validation saves a lot of error handling boilerplate

Happy to share any specific files or answer questions about the setup.