Articles

An API is not a thing, it is a weird presence we communicate with, develop and implement. An API is an abstract idea, which is hard to catch for non-developers. I find some concepts challenging to truly understand, let alone explain without context. Take language or loyalty for example. Or an API. What is it? Like Schrödinger's cat, such abstract concepts loose their real characteristics if we try to pin a static definition on them. But if a feline entity is so useful in explaining the quantum state, maybe metaphors would work for APIs too. I studied quantumchemistry, so you see how the cat got here. In this blogpost, I try to show what an API is in action, using metaphors from different professions and the definitions I found on the internet. This one goes out for the lawyer, the med, the interpreter and the writer.

We wanted to understand the nature of trust issues and to figure out how we can overcome them in order to create a “frictionless” onboarding experience. Here is what we’ve found so far. We hope it’ll be valuable to both users and owners of developer portals.

At Pronovix, we use the paragraphs module almost every day to create new web pages. We continuously evaluate and improve our landing page creation process: we were already able to shorten the feedback process and reduce the number of editing rounds before publishing.

As part of our research into content architecture best practices for Developer Portals, we’ve done a small scale investigation to evaluate what URLs are used by API companies.

What makes good API docs? To answer that question and help us build the best possible developer portal for a customer, we performed a small inhouse research and reviewed existing blog posts about best practices. The following is a synthesis of what we found.