Articles

Recording of our presentation at the CIDM IDEAS 2018 Online Conference about API Documentation Best Practices.

What information is absolutely essential on a developer portal? What kind of API documentation do you need? Is there a best practice that can be followed when launching a developer portal? We formulated 11 questions and built 3 mock sitemaps that demonstrate how portals can address the different stages of the developer journey.

Should use cases and case studies be part of your API documentation? They play two crucial roles on a developer portal: They act as social proof for your API product (sales function) and they can be an introduction to more specific, implementation scenario documentation types. We explored these fringe documentation types, both on business sites and developer portals, of 18 API companies with different profiles.

A developer portal is more than just the documentation for an API. As a sort of self-service support hub, it is a key DevRel tool that helps an organization to provide the best possible developer experience for its APIs. A developer portal has a role in support, marketing, sales, and engineering. A conversation on the #documenting-apis WTD slack channel sparked the idea for this blog post.

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.