017: DX Lessons from 100 DevTool Interviews

Today's episode is a fireside chat with Greg Chan, CTO of Akoya, that took place at OpenFinity Days in New York. Greg shares his unique perspective on building exceptional developer experiences, the strategic importance of DX in today's tech landscape, and the lessons learned from his journey at Akoya.Brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠APIMatic⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠APIMatic SDKs help increase developer adoption of your APIs. Auto-generate SDKs with idiomatic libraries, language-specific documentation, dynamic code samples, and getting-started guides from your API definition.

Joshua Markam, Developer Relations leader, sat down to discuss his role at Verizon and the innovations around the Internet of Things. He discusses the challenges developers face in IoT connectivity, the significance of edge computing, and the future opportunities in the IoT space. The conversation also highlights Verizon's partnership with APImatic to enhance developer experience and the trends shaping telco APIs, including the emerging Camara standard.Brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠APIMatic⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠APIMatic SDKs help increase developer adoption of your APIs. Auto-generate SDKs with idiomatic libraries, language-specific documentation, dynamic code samples, and getting-started guides from your API definition.

Tom Hacohen, CEO at Svix, sat down with me to share how they deliver webhooks as a service with a developer experience that places the customer at the center. Tom believes that when building developer tools, your perspective doesn’t matter; it’s all about the customer. Good documentation isn’t just about completeness and depth; it’s about simplicity and accessibility.  Brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠APIMatic⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ APIMatic SDKs help increase developer adoption of your APIs. Auto-generate SDKs with idiomatic libraries, language-specific documentation, dynamic code samples, and getting-started guides from your API definition.

Scaling Dev Tools, Podcast host Jack Bridger spent two years interviewing 100 dev tool creators to learn how to build successful products that appeal to developers. Jack and I discuss what he’s learned about engaging customers, measuring your DX, ways for your product to stand out in a crowd, and tips for collaborating with influencers. Scaling DevTools Brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠APIMatic⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ APIMatic SDKs help increase developer adoption of your APIs. Auto-generate SDKs with idiomatic libraries, language-specific documentation, dynamic code samples, and getting-started guides from your API definition.

Replacement episode to fix missing audio. Developer Advocate Beppe Catanese from the Dutch payment company Adyen joins me. Over the past decade, Adyen has been expanding globally. Beppe and I will discuss the internal pipeline built at Adyen to automate the creation of a world-class developer experience. Beppe also shares his work in open source and how Adyen measures the success of their DX. Adyen Developer Portal Brought to you by APIMatic Questions Beppe answers in this episode Tell us about your career that lead to working in developer experience at Adyen What have you observed in the evolution of developer experience around APIs? When it comes to SDKs, do you have an engineering team creating those by hand or auto generating them? How are changes to your OpenAPI definition managed as part of your pipeline or workflow? Do you have contract testing as part of your pipeline? Is your team writing tests or generating them for each SDK that is produced from the pipeline? How many people are working to maintain the OpenAPI SDK pipeline you've built? You have many teams feeding APIs into a unified developer experience? How do you go about discovering OpenAPI tools, do you use Open source or build your own? Do you open source your SDKs? Are there any challenges taking contribution to your open source SDKs when parts are generated? How are you measuring the benefits and return on investment for building a good developer experience, documentation, SDKs and tools? Are you using anything to measure the usage of tools and SDKs? How did you get involved contributing to OpenAPI Generator project and what was that experience like for you? Did you work on OpenAPI generator's core engine in Java or the mustache templates which controlled the output for each programming language? Where you generating the server code to dispatch webhooks or the client code to receive? Is OpenAPI helping standardize how companies are implementing webhooks so they are easier for developers to consume? Should developers be concerned that OpenAPI Generator has over 4000 open issues and over 400 Pull requests? What are OpenAPI Workflows and how will developers benefit from them?

Author James Higginbotham explains his five principles of good API design to me. We discuss the importance of empathy, discovery, and use cases in documentation. James advises dealing with API sprawl and ways to deliver SDKs and libraries as part of your developer experience. Key Takeaways: - Focus on empathy, discovery, and understanding the problem when designing APIs - Documentation should focus on use cases and scenarios with an outside perspective  - Plan for APIs to last; don't design them in isolation - Manage API sprawl through mapping, leveraging existing APIs, and unified front ends - Evaluate business needs carefully when retiring APIs and transition users smoothly - SDKs and libraries can come from API providers and the community or be generated by individual consumers. Principles of Web API Design LaunchAny Brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠APIMatic⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ APIMatic SDKs help increase developer adoption of your APIs. Auto-generate SDKs with idiomatic libraries, language-specific documentation, dynamic code samples, and getting-started guides from your API definition.

Ash Arnwine, Director of Developer Relations at Nylas, joins the Podcast. He describes the evolution of Nylas' APIs, which developers use to integrate various email and calendar platforms seamlessly into their applications. Ash emphasizes the company's commitment to “meeting developers where they are at” through robust documentation and community engagement. Nylas Brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠APIMatic⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ APIMatic SDKs help increase developer adoption of your APIs. Auto-generate SDKs with idiomatic libraries, language-specific documentation, dynamic code samples, and getting-started guides from your API definition.

Alex Patterson, the creator of CodingCat.dev and Developer Relations Engineer at FusionAuth, joins us to talk about the future of authentication. Alex educates me on Passkey and WebAuthN and explains how your mom won’t need to remember her password in the future. Alex also shares how Fusion Auth improves its developer onboarding through community, content, and product. FusionAuth CodingCat.dev Brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠APIMatic⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ APIMatic SDKs are used by millions of developers. Auto-generate SDKs with idiomatic libraries, language specific documentation, dynamic code samples and getting started guides from your API definition.

Adam DuVander, author and founder of Every Developer joins the podcast to discuss how to rate your developer experience using his DX Index, the importance of providing a path from your homepage to developer resources and ways to attract new developers. He also shares a story of a company who found themselves with the wrong developers on their site. ⁠Every Developer⁠ Brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠APIMatic⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ APIMatic SDKs are used by millions of developers. Auto-generate SDKs with idiomatic libraries, language specific documentation, dynamic code samples and getting started guides from your API definition.

Amara Graham leads the developer experience team at Cumunda where they own documentation and devtools for their evolving platform. She shares the challenges of hiring for her developer experience team and we dive into the question of how to measure successful documentation. Brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠APIMatic⁠⁠⁠⁠ APIMatic SDKs are used by millions of developers. Auto-generate SDKs with idiomatic libraries, language specific documentation, dynamic code samples and getting started guides from your API definition.