What exactly is Developer Experience?
This was the crux of a talk given by Nauman Ali, Product Manager, APIMatic at the WTD San Francisco meetup.
Write the docs is a global community of people who care about documentation. They boast a Slack network of thousands of members and are physically present on 3 continents where they conduct regular meet-ups.
Our team had the luck of running into some members of the San Francisco Chapter, earlier in the summer, and an arrangement was made for Nauman to speak at their latest meet-up. With this talk, we aimed to introduce the latest practices in API Documentation and explain what Developer Experience is for APIs.
The entire talk is available on YouTube and can be found on Write the Docs channel:
“….APIs are not only for savvy developers or tech companies”
Nauman started his talk explaining how APIs are slowly taking over the world, and how it has become important for every business to have an API. The cyberspace is changing rapidly, and just like it was important for businesses to have a website a few years back, it’s important for them to have an API today to exist and stay relevant.
He highlighted how APIs are not as easy to interact with and require prior documentation and know-how for third-party interactors to deal with, in case of APIs, the third party interactors being developers, which brings us to the concept of Developer Experience.
What exactly is Developer Experience?
Developer Experience (DX) is the equivalent of User Experience (UX) when it comes to a developer.
It is a concept often referenced in the API world and rightly so. APIs are complex structures and unless you properly explain what your API does, nobody is ever going to use it. In fact, the value of your API and the usage is something that directly depends on your Developer Experience.
Developers are the lifeblood of an API economy and until it is made easy for them to access and play around with your API, it may never really see success.
For Nauman, Developer Experience is really simple. For him, a great Developer Experience is when even novice developers come to your API and require minimum onboarding time, no handholding, and achieve maximum satisfaction. He then introduced the 3:30:3 Rule, according to which, a developer coming in of any experience should take:
- 3 seconds to understand what your API does
- 30 seconds to understand the required functionality
- 3 minutes to be up and running
This according to him should be the end goal of your entire Developer Experience campaign. These are the metrics you should measure your efforts against at end of the day. He mentioned how companies like Stripe and Twilio have come close to this and have found massive success with their APIs.
What constitutes a great Developer Experience?
He then discussed how a great Developer Experience can be achieved and the components that help form a great DX, which he listed as:
Getting started Guides
Client Libraries
API Console
Code Samples
FAQs
Change Logs
Dashboard(Monitoring and Reporting)
Authentication
He again ran a quick comparison and discussed how some of the top APIs in the world do Developer Experience and which of these components they offer, with the best offering all of them.
He then talked about how important it was to take the correct steps and measures throughout your API Lifecycle to ensure you end up providing a great experience.
You can read in detail about the best practices you can follow throughout your API lifecycle here:
Nauman primarily focused on getting your specification right and how that will drive your entire API Program. He mentioned APIMatic’s Transformer and the flexibility the product allows you with your tooling. No matter what specification you are comfortable with, OpenAPI, RAML or API Blueprint, you can convert back and forth as many times as you like with the Transformer and can even integrate the Transformer API in your CI/CD cycle to convert specs on the go.
Coming to the consumption part he mentioned how Twilio, Stripe, Algolia and other big API companies achieved their success by making their APIs super easy to consume. However, it is important to note that, for all of these APIs are the bread and butter and they can afford to spend their entire resources towards a better Developer Experience. But traditional companies like banks, airlines, and telcos who are newly jumping into the API space or are opening up their API to wider audiences, may necessarily not have the expertise or the knowledge to pull of something similar.
But that does not have to be the case anymore and that’s where APIMatic comes in. With us, you can produce everything that makes it easy for developers to consume APIs. With us, you can provide a Developer Experience only parallel to the best in the industry. And all of that with the least of effort (in minutes) and least of resources. All of you need to do is manage and maintain a specification, which Nauman focused on earlier, and let us do the rest.
Don't miss reading APIMatic's philosophy behind automating the developer experience:
Concluding this, we asked Nauman how we felt about speaking at the event and he was absolutely overwhelmed talking to the veterans from the Documentation industry. The audience though not very technical, had some amazing feedback to offer and we went back home with some great takeaways and insights.
We’d like to throw a special thanks to Monique, for doing such a superb job organizing the event and Richard for recording all the videos. You can join up
Write the Docs — San Francisco Bay Area group on Meetup.com to stay updated with their latest meetups and events!
Nauman will be in London this November, speaking at DevRelCon on 7th and 8th and API the Docs on the 9th. You can reach out to him @Mnaumanali94 on Twitter or via email at nauman.ali@apimatic.io
