Stoplight 💖s SendGrid

Tom Pytleski
Stoplight API Corner
2 min readFeb 14, 2017

Hours of planning can save you weeks of programming.

Valentine’s Day, documentation and testing are often surrounded by alternative facts. Too often we don’t put enough time and effort into testing, documentation and valentine’s day because we feel we can’t afford it. If this was just about you, then sure, maybe the effort and time isn’t worth it. But this isn’t about you, especially not today.

When we think we can’t afford investing in testing and documentation upfront, what we really are saying (unintentionally) is that our customers don’t deserve it.

SendGrid is an email infrastructure company — they handle all the technical details around emails so that their customers can worry about making awesome products. Two years ago, SendGrid realized that sending billions of emails reliably is only possible if customers know how to effectively (and programmatically!) use their API. With the help of Stoplight, they now have ~25k lines of OAI(Swagger), Interactive Documentation and unit tests for their 7 different SDKs. These new tools ensure ease of use, consistency, and broader access managing email. This upfront investment means that SendGrid customers can get up and running faster than ever, and more importantly customers can feel confident that their emails will end up where they should, when they should.

The reality is that you can’t afford to not invest in your customers. API documentation and testing isn’t for you, it’s for everyone else in your community. SendGrid knew this, and their customers appreciate it — the investment is paying off in spades.

At Stoplight we believe it is important to shine a light on companies like SendGrid, and we will continue to share stories of customers doing awesome stuff. If you want to learn more about Stoplight visit us at stoplight.io, our door is open and our team is more than happy to talk.

Lastly, we would like to say thank you SendGrid. You were our first customer, and for that we will always be grateful.

The Stoplight Team

@marbemac, @pytlesk4, @chrisnlott, @vazhaom

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