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.

SQL databases are really fast when you need all the information stored together in a record row, but they are a bad fit when you need to search for relationship patterns that are not already stored together in your database. A significant performance penalty is incurred for every additional table that needs to be joined for a query. That is why SQL databases are notoriously bad at deducting relationships from datasets. Graph databases however are really good at this task.

The main purpose of Platform Software Development Kits and Helper/Client Libraries is to accelerate and simplify development. A well maintained SDK is a trust signal that indicates the level of support and usage of your API for a language, framework, or development platform. In this post, we’ll look at how the developer portals in our research sample included SDKs.

Twilio is regarded as one of the API industry’s leaders, so when, after five years, Twilio changes the documentation format on their developer portal, everybody wants to know why. Jarod Reyes and Andrew Baker (both developers of Twilio's developer education team) gave a presentation about the reason for the changes at SIGNAL 2016. Because we found them valuable and wanted to share them with our developer portal mailinglist, we’ll summarize their findings in this blog post.

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.

Kristof Van Tomme presented an evolved version of his "AI the docs!” talk at CIDM's European DITA conference in Munich, 2016 November 14-15. This time with the subtitle “Conversational UI, Embedded Help and Artificial Help. A fertile ground for minimalism and DITA".