Recording from UAEurope 2017 conference. With many software developers now spending their time developing APIs, there’s an increasing demand for API documentation writers. It’s a fast changing field, with emerging information design patterns and authoring tools. It’s also different from end user documentation, and this means many Technical Communicators are uncertain if and how they… Read more »
Tag: API documentation
Have Amazon, Dropbox, Microsoft and Google got their information design wrong?
On an API documentation course we ran for a client yesterday, we showed a number of developer documentation websites, including ones from Amazon, Dropbox, Google and Microsoft. One common theme the delegates noticed was these sites contained a in-page table of contents, or a set of related links, on the right hand set of the screen. You will… Read more »
Research into how API documentation fails
There isn’t a great deal of research into API documentation, and the factors that make API content good or bad. Here’s some of the papers we’ve found so far: How API documentation fails. Research by Uddin and Robillard, McGill University, 2015. Creating and Evolving Developer Documentation: Understanding the Decisions of Open Source Contributors, Dagenais and Robillard, 2010…. Read more »
New course – Planning, writing and managing an API documentation project
We’ve started work on a new training course about planning, writing and managing an API documentation project. Primarily aimed at REST APIs, this will help you to organise, plan, author and control your API documentation. This course is aimed mostly at people who are not developers, and no programming experience will be required. The exercises are… Read more »
Should we add an API documentation course to our training roadmap?
One of the factors that influences the development of new training courses is, naturally, the potential level of interest in a particular course. If you have any comments on what you’d like to see in a course on planning and writing API documentation, please email us with your thoughts.