A Developers’ Guide: A Journey Beyond Coding
Creating the perfect developer guide is the key to the success of your software and its application. They allow your target audience to quickly gain all the information they need to use your product and to start developing against your API.
With the rapid growth of API applications, it has become even more important to communicate a developer’s thought process clearly. This not only avoids unnecessary confusion, but also empowers the developer to aim beyond mere coding tasks.
How to Create the Perfect Developers’ Guide?
Keeping the Developer Engaged
Developers are first and foremost techies who love coding, tech processes and digital wizardry. However, they want their products or services implemented with least errors and hassles.
Grabbing a dev’s attention in a developer guide means showing them something they can instantly act upon. If the guide spends too much time on explaining intricate details or the subject matter, unfortunately the developer will no longer be on the same page with you.
Triggering Developer Interest
Once you’ve grabbed a developer’s attention, you need to keep them interested through easy-to-use guides and utilities. These should let them progress from a simple code snippet, to a running application. There are many ways this can be accomplished but the key is to achieve this quickly and efficiently.
The main page should provide access to a tailored and more detailed documentation. Likewise, the front page should help the dev to select one of the available languages and the code snippets are then shown in that language. Developers can also self-provision a sandbox, which simplifies the setup of their development ecosystem.
Empowering Devs with Knowledge
An involved and driven developer, who knows what they can do with your API, is now ready to delve deeper into your requirements with adequate knowledge. This can cover a range of subjects, which are as follows:
- Understanding the “unhappy” path including error scenarios that happen out-of-band of the API call and how these are addressed
- Using web hooks to create feedback loops for other out-of-band activities
- Understanding rate limits, quotas, throttling, etc. that may affect how your API can be consumed
Deepening a developer’s knowledge might need them to understand the subject matter of the industry you operate in. This is because your implementation might reflect certain industry practices or constraints.
Your API might not be entirely perfect and can be coupled to an existing backend that is not RESTful in nature. Also, with experience, your proficiency in delivering APIs might still be growing. This would require certain design choices to be clearly explained to the developer.
Ensuring the Final Production Run
The success of the aforementioned processes and efforts lies in taking a developer’s application to production. This might vary, as it is largely dependent on the API provider and the type of API. The key to success is in making this process as easy as possible, with clear guidelines on the steps and process.
Luckily, free-to-use public APIs implementing no security measures can go to production quite easily. Most consumers are likely to be using a single API endpoint right through the entire API lifecycle. API providers should ensure developers are aware of this fact to allow them to develop their application as efficiently as possible.
Where an API does have a promotional model, the API provider needs to clearly state how developers will need to configure their applications between development and production.
