Textbook in PDF format

Version: 2022-10-27
A compilation of top best practices for improving the developer experience for an API-as-a-Product.
At Nordic APIs, we pay special attention to the overall strategy behind Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). And time and time again, we've found that quality developer experience truly sets apart favorite services with high adoption from the underperforming ones. So, how can you design a great API experience?
In this volume, we've collected our top-performing articles on developer experience. We'll look into tips to streamline the discovery and onboarding process, as well as ways to make your API more self-service. We cover best practices around documentation, sandboxes, and sample code. We'll also explore some particular design traits to keep consistent to retain happy users.
Developer experience, sometimes abbreviated as DevX or DX, is similar to user experience (UX) but focuses on the experience developers have while using a software tool. A tool’s DX is a benchmark for how usable or intuitive the service is. And whereas DX used to be viewed as an afterthought, it’s now becoming more of a necessity to stay relevant in today’s digital economy. What sets DX apart from UX is the frame of interaction. DX goes beyond the standard graphical user interface to consider the holistic developer journey across all interaction points, whether it’s the reference documentation, command line, SDKs, libraries, API endpoints, or sandboxes. Generally, a service with quality developer experience is well-documented and comes with a solid getting started guide and sample code for common executions.
As APIs surge in importance across the industry, DX has become a competitive edge. If you have an API-as-a-Product or want to improve usability for your internal microservices, honing in on developer experience is becoming more and more important. And although our focus will be API developer experience, these traits could be applied to increasing developer satisfaction across all flavors of software services