Exploring APIs, not Documentation Hi Everybody! We’ve been working crazy hard to smooth out the API Explorer feature in ReadMe.io. We believe the optimal way to learn about an API is to interact with it rather than read about…
Documenting Microservices in ReadMe Many companies are breaking larger codebases into microservices, so different teams can work on parts of the site at different paces. They're like APIs, except for an internal audience. Like any API, they need to…
Challenge Coins and Company Credits Startups are a team sport. Some people are recognized with salaries or equity, however much of the help we've gotten along the way has been less formal. Our team may be small, but the "ReadMe…
I Hated Writing Documentation so I Founded a Company People tell you to start a company around doing what you love. I founded a company to stop doing what I hated—documentation. I started my career as a developer at Mozilla working with PHP, before…
A Visual Guide to What’s New in Swagger 3.0 Over the past few years, Swagger 2 has become the de facto standard for defining or documenting your API. Since then, it's been moved to the Linux foundation and renamed to OpenAPI Spec. Version 3 has…
7 Unconventional Opportunities to Improve Your API Documentation When developers think of documentation, we often tend to think of walls of texts or verbose reference guides. However, the purpose of documentation is to be the UI layer for an API or code library:…
Adding Clarity and a Dash of Whimsy to API Error Messages I happened upon an error onceAnd it was drab and dire!Instead of bringing sadnessWhat if errors could inspire? Off to vim, I rushed to writeThe PR was merged in no time.Now every time you get…
How to Write API Errors That Keep Your Users Moving Forward The secret to good DX is doing the right thing when things go wrong. Most error messages are a dead end, telling what went wrong but offering no help. The best error messages feel more…
5 Types of API Documentation for a Successful API Close your eyes and picture API documentation. You probably imagined a reference guide — that three column page that lists all the endpoints, and then enumerates all the params and options for each one. There…
7 Best Practices for Writing and Updating API Docs Developers respect clean, simple code. We have to be experts at finding ways to do more with less. And while that skill set is highly valued in development, it doesn't always transfer over to writing…