Three sleep intervals for three APIs: Steam 250ms, GitHub 100ms, HuggingFace none (opens in new tab)  🔌API Design

When I built the ETL pipelines for three programmatic directory sites in April — Top AI Tools (HuggingFace data), Find Games Like (Steam data), and Open Alternative To (GitHub data) — I had to figure out rate limits for three completely different APIs in the same week. The numbers, the failure modes, and the right way to handle errors are all different. Here's what I actually shipped and the reasoning behind each number. Steam: 250ms, deliberately aggressive Steam's developer docs are sparse ...