The Art of Developer Experience Podcast

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

Byrne Reese, Product Owner at RingCentral shares how he transitioned from engineering into product management and his love of building engaged and collaborative communities. He believes documentation is an investment in the long-term success of your community. We also dive into his developer pyramid as a model for companies looking to build up a developer community.

RingCentral Developer Portal

Developer Pyramid: A Tool for Building Developer Programs

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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.

Caroline Lewko, author and co-founder of devrel.agency joins me to discuss audience segmentation and building personas and the value of understanding the developer journey. We touch on external vs internal DX and Caroline shares when a C-Level DevRel role makes sense.

Developer Journey Map

DevRel.Agency

10th Annual State of Developer Survey

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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.

Head of Developer Advocacy at Square, Richard Moot also leads the API design committee at Block. He explains the benefits of collaboration between internal API consumers and the API committee so guidelines are welcomed and internal developers don’t see the committee as an enforcement group. Richard shares the insight that APIs can be forever and every time a developer builds on a new API you should expect to support it for a long time. He also discusses ways companies are managing API changes and depreciation.

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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.

Developer Experience Engineer, Steve Pousty from VMWare joins the podcast. Steve has over 17 years of experience working with developer communities. In our interview, we touched on many topics including the pros and cons of placing developer-facing roles within traditional teams like engineering, marketing and support. Steve shares advice on how to handle the overlap of responsibilities between DevRel and marketing by applying the rule “Clear boundaries, infinite possibilities”.

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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.

Senior software engineer at Lob, Benny Kitchell sat down with us to talk about moving from hand written SDKs to auto generated client libraries and documentation using OpenAPI Generator. Benny shares some tips for those getting started with code generation. He also shares his philosophy around testing. We wrap up with a few dev tool recommendations.

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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.

VP Developer Relations at JP Morgan, Kody O’Connell joins the podcast. We talk about his time at Xero, Optimizely and how he’s improving the DX at JP Morgan. We discuss the article by Kurt Kempel titled Redefining Developer Experience, Why DX is the New DevRel. Then we wrap up with a lightning round where Kody answers the question as we exit the COVID pandemic: are large developer conferences overrated or underrated in 2023?

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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 specifications.

Phil Leggetter who’s built developer experiences at Pusher, Nexmo, Vonage, Ably and most recently Tigris Data joined me to share his thoughts on documentation. What does good documentation look like and are we ready to make the move towards great documentation? When I asked Phil to place DX on a maturity timeline, he responded that  developer experience is at the young adult stage, then reminded me that a lifecycle metaphor involves a “rebirth”. Adding the next iteration of developer experience needs to be a rebirth that incorporates AI technology and a change in the way developers interact with technology.

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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 specifications.

Luke Kilpatrick, developer marketing leader joins us and discusses the importance of building trust with developers. We touch on the two competing definitions of developer experience we see today and some of the tools internal developer experience teams use.

Luke cautions against placing demand generation metrics on your developer relations team and offers advice when joining a new company and building internal relationships.

Brian Rinaldi, Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly joins us to discuss the role of SDKs to enable integration of feature flags in multiple environments. Brian’s work involves creating technical guides, code samples and tutorials to support emerging technologies.

• Launch Darkly
• Astro

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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 specifications.

Former Product Owner for Xero’s Developer Platform, Richard Fortune, joins the podcast to discuss how persistent engagement helps developers grow along with your technology. He share’s how the tight feedback loop between Xero’s developer advocates and his product team was a super power for pushing the developer experience forward. Richard also touches on the API health dashboard built to promote better behavior by surfacing KPIs on API usage to developers.

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 specifications.