Articles

API friction can be seen as the inverse of developer experience, and it is a great conceptual device to help you identify issues in your API products. To create a great developer experience (DX), it is important to remove as much friction as possible from the developer’s journey.

In this guest post Jenny Wanger, Product Manager at Arity, gives an overview of the most important developer experience KPIs (key performance indicators).

Most of the time when we talk about developer experience, we mean downstream DX, the experience of developers that implement APIs. But what about the developers that create APIs? In a previous post we wrote about the 8 stakeholders of developer portals, we argued that while the developers that use APIs are important, we shouldn’t forget about the experience of other stakeholders of a developer portal. In this post we explore the experience of one of these audiences - the API developers - and explain what upstream DX is, when it matters, and how you can use a developer portal to improve it.

Where does technical documentation stand with agile development methods? Watch and read about the talk Rob Woodgate (@agiledoc) did at the Write the Docs London-GDS mini conference on the practice of agile documentation.

Developer portals are important for your API's adoption and support. They are also a trust signal: a well designed and actively maintained developer portal shows that an organization is investing in its APIs. It helps convince developers that they can rely on them. In this post I’ll zoom in on the trust signals business model, partner policy, API quality, API uptime status, versioning policy, documentation and developer portal production quality.

At the API days in London, I gave a presentation about developer portals. In it I shared mental models and frameworks that I think can help improve the quality of a developer portal: I decided to write 6 dedicated blog posts about what I discussed.