Articles

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.

Without proper documentation, an API team will spend countless hours on workshops, trainings and support. In this talk, presented at Apigee’s API Tech Forum in Amsterdam, Kristof Van Tomme explored 7 frameworks to help you build better API Developer Portals.

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.

APIs are going to transform the world: they not only benefit from network effects caused by specialisation, the data they collect also makes them a prime candidate for the emergence of specialised Artificial Intelligence. Considering how powerful APIs are, it would be an injustice should they remain the privilege of developers.

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.