API Documentation Trainings

Slides from the workshop delivered at the Evolution of Technical Communication 2018 conference.

The workshop features an introduction to REST APIs followed by hands-on activities in which the participants (technical communication professionals) put themselves in developers' shoes used and some APIs and API tools like developers.

If the task to document an API comes earlier than the training and study you feel you need (and it always does!) and you don't know where to start and how to go about it, this presentation will show you not only how to survive your first API documentation gig but also how to turn it into a great learning experience and make a meaningful contribution at that.

The presentation deals mainly with documenting REST APIs, but the approach and the conclusions apply to all kinds of APIs and their documentation.

Presented at the tekom's 2019 Spring Conference (Vienna) and 2019 Evolution of Technical Communication Conference (Sofia).

Even though documenting APIs is a highly technical proposition, the contribution that a technical communicator can make to the documentation is not the same as that of the writing developer. In fact, API documentation is the place where we can shine and make the difference between failure and success of a product on the market.

In this presentation, we'll see what makes good API documentation and how API writers can bring unique value to it.

Presented at the tekom Spring Conference 2019 (Vienna).

A workshop at the 2019 Evolution of Technical Communication Conference (Sofia).

We first outline the elements that make for good REST API documentation and prepared an API documentation quality check-list. Then we tried to use several publicly available APIs from scratch while helping ourselves with their documentation. At that, we estimated the quality of their documentation “on the go” and created recommendations for improving it.