All APIs must have human-readable documentation that defines the technical surface area of each API being made available to API consumers, providing a simple, intuitive, and ideally interactive HTML representation of APIs, methods, operations, requests, responses, errors, and other elements.
APIs Are Always Well Documented
Policies
Documentation
Documentation is the human-readable representation of your API's surface area. Paths, methods, descriptions, examples -- this is where consumers go to understand what is possible and how to get sta...
Experiences
Alignment
I see product and engineering teams talking past each other constantly when it comes to APIs. Without alignment on the why behind each API, you end up with technically sound resources that nobody a...
Communication
I struggle with how little communication happens between the teams producing APIs and the people consuming them. Blogs, changelogs, roadmaps -- these are building blocks that most teams just skip, ...
Onboarding
I see teams dealing with massive friction during onboarding. If a consumer can't get from zero to their first successful API call in minutes, you've already lost them. Getting started guides, sandb...
Discovery
Discovery is the dark matter of the API landscape. Teams build APIs that already exist somewhere else, and consumers can't find the APIs they need. Without a catalog and proper metadata, you're jus...
Simplicity
I am a big believer that the best APIs are the simple ones. When I see overly complex API designs, I know someone was thinking about their internal architecture instead of the consumer. Keep the su...
Consistency
When I look across the API landscape, consistency is one of the biggest challenges I see. Every team does things differently, and the surface area of inconsistency just grows until governance becom...