From The Blog

05 Jun
2025

Publish to GitHub pages with Sphinx

I’m a big fan of docs-as-code for more or less any type of content publishing, but I’m less of a fan of Jekyll, the default tool used in GitHub pages. I also prefer ReStructuredText over Markdown as a markup format, so Sphinx is definitely on my shortlist of SSGs (Static Site Generators) for my projects. I recently switched the rst2pdf docs over to using Sphinx hosted on GitHub pages, so here are my setup notes. Continue reading →

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28 Apr
2025

Just Enough Docs

Too many open source projects suffer from inadequate documentation, and that hurts their adoption, their communities, and puts more burden on maintainers. Many people who create open source software don’t see see themselves as writers, but today I’m sharing tips for documenting open source projects without it needing to take up a huge amount of time to get something published and ready for (docs) contributions. Continue reading →

Posted in tech | 2 Replies

26 Mar
2025

Right-Size Your RESTful API: More Flexibility Without GraphQL

If you publish a RESTful API and there are situations when you need less (or more!) detail in the API responses from your API – then this post is for you. When I run into this with the teams I advise, the initial problem statement usually arrives more like “We need to move to GraphQL”, but this is a solution, not a problem to solve. The problem usually turns out to be either or both of:

  • the API responses are simply too large for some of the clients or uses cases, users need to select just the fields they want
  • the API doesn’t have enough information in the response payload for this client or use case, users need to choose to include nested data

GraphQL is one way to achieve these things, but this post is about the RESTful way to provide the right level of detail in an API response. Continue reading →

Posted in tech | 3 Replies

Talks, Articles, Podcasts, and More

Article

OpenAPI: How to handle file management


The New Stack, April 2025
Slides

OpenAPI for Web Developers


PHP UK Conference, February 2025
Article

New OpenAPI Standards


The New Stack, February 2025
Video

Panel: Maintaining Open Source Software


State of Open, February 2025
Slides

OpenAPI Standards Landscape


FOSDEM, February 2025
Slides

Beyond the README


FOSDEM, February 2025