Organized by the Center for Information–Development Management, IDEAS is a two-day industry conference including five 60-minute concurrent sessions in two tracks. The theme of this winter’s conference was Writing Well, where we spoke about API Documentation Best Practices.
In this session we talked about different aspects of API documentation:
- Why API documentation plays an important role in the API economy
- The difference between API documentation and developer portals
- The target audience of API docs
- Developer portal components and best practices for arranging and writing content for each
- Usability considerations, like interactions, readability and personality
- Ways to edit and keep your documentation up-to-date, workflow considerations, and the docs like code approach
By the end of the presentation, we hope to have given Technical Writers a solid starting point for seeing how they can convert their technical writing skills to API documentation writing, along with some resources that they can use to learn more. Although we aimed the presentation at Technical Writers, we think that all stakeholders of an API documentation project can benefit from watching it.