Articles

In this talk Kristof explains the differences between public and private APIs, introduce upstream developer experience, and explain how it can improve downstream DX. Introduce experience design (a.k.a. gamification) and Innersourcing (open sourcing practices behind the firewall) and describe how they could be used on internal developer portals.

What Is a Developer Portal? A trust signal for your API. A self-service hub. A dashboard for your API products. A list of endpoints is not enough. We provide you with an infographic to help explain.

In this series we will look into some of the best and most innovative practices developer portals from various industries use to anticipate on the possible expectations of developers.

In this post, we explore how developer marketing practices can help to motivate & engage users and improve DX along the downstream developer journey stages in order to generate a viral loop — i.e. the process in which your acquired users become portal advocates and help drive adoption on your developer portal.

Developer portals play not only a technical role, they also play a somewhat obscure commercial role. We don't like to say that this is a commercial site, but actually it is also about promotion. You have to explain what you do – preferably not in a hard-core manipulative way. For that, you need more than reference docs. How to get started? What does that API do? A lot more than just the very technical aspects need to be explained. A less well circulated purpose of developer portals is their being a trust signal. They engender trust by showing how much investment went into building that portal. They have to show that the API services documented on that portal will keep on existing and will get reliable support long term.

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.