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Markdown/Mermaid output for OpenAPI Arazzo
12 March 2025
Read moreAPI reference documentation changed the way we built integrations, and eventually became part of the driving force for OpenAPI adoption and all the good tooling that flowed from it. As a developer experience specialist, I spend a lot of time thinking about how human users can work with the technical …
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From HTTP to OpenAPI with Optic
17 February 2025
Read moreI've been using Optic's CLI, an OpenAPI tool that does a bunch of things including diffing OpenAPI descriptions and comparing HTTP traffic with OpenAPI. My use case was an established API that didn't have an OpenAPI file yet - using Optic we could create one as a starting point, and then move to a design-first workflow to make the changes that I was there to help with. For this blog post, I've used the example of https://api.joind.in as an excellent representation of an API still in use, but without an OpenAPI file and not built with code that a code generator would recognise.
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Preview OpenAPI as HTML using Scalar
14 February 2025
Read moreThe API DevTools space is alive and well with lots of new and exciting products popping up all the time. I've been especially impressed by the new tools in the docs space, but some of the options are less practical for use as quick human-friendly OpenAPI renderings or previews to use during API development. My current favourite in this space is Scalar because I can get an HTML file to easily include in a build or share with others. It's a bit of a hack though, so I thought I'd share...
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Presenting with pdfpc
11 February 2025
Read moreMy slide deck tool ( rst2pdf ) produces PDFs, and I use pdfpc to present the PDF slides. It shows the current and next slides, my notes, a timer, and it probably does other things too that I don't use! I've used it for years but it was really designed for "in real world" presenting with one or two screens. Recently I discovered it also supports some great options for remote presentations, but I had to look up how to do that so here are my notes (mostly in case I need to look it up 1 minute before I go on stage again!!).
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Querying the GitHub GraphQL API
27 January 2025
Read moreIn a recent project around open source contributors, I wanted to take a look at which projects a particular user (actually a few of them, but I wrote a wrapper to repeat the process for each handle) maintains. GitHub doesn't show this maintainer relationship, so instead I used the v4 GraphQL API and looked at pull request comments on repositories that the user has access to. I'm sharing my query and the Python script I used to make the API calls to.
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Save edits to OpenAPI as an Overlay
09 January 2025
Read moreFor teams that generate OpenAPI from their codebase, there's a tough choice between maintaining rich and extensive content such as Markdown descriptions and examples in codebase annotations, or in making those changes to the generated file - and then losing them when the code changes and the file is regenerated. The new OpenAPI Overlay Specification defines a format for storing updates to an OpenAPI document, and there's a new generation of tools to make it easy to do, so let's take a look.
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Run GitHub Actions on Subdirectories
07 January 2025
Read moreI come across a lot of "greedy" GitHub Actions, where automation is running across a whole project instead of only on the parts that are relevant. Examples might be code linters that report problems with documentation folders, or the inverse of that. It's especially problematic in monorepos where we probably want to use the same tool when we're doing the same task for different subfolders, but that tool might not make sense to run everywhere.
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OpenAPI Overlays to avoid API oversharing
12 December 2024
Read moreMost APIs aren't perfect. By design they are long-lived and may serve many audiences. I see a lot of organisations maintaining multiple versions of APIs, or simply not documenting some of the endpoints to avoid them being included in the published documentation and confusing users. The problem of API redaction is a real one in most organisations, and it goes unsolved or is solved in a way that causes ongoing friction. I've helped a few API projects to solve this problem with the new OpenAPI Overlay specification so I thought I'd share!
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How to structure and share code examples
18 November 2024
Read moreWriting for technical audiences often means sharing code in one form or another. If the code is only for illustration purposes, then it can be included in the article for observation. But if the code is useful or reusable by your readers, then you need a way to make it available to them. I've seen a few questions on this recently (shout out to the DevRel Collective slack for a brilliant discussion AND nagging me to write it up as a post!), so I'm sharing my experiences on how to publish and maintain code in sane ways!
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Pretty-print JSON with jq
01 November 2024
Read moreWrangling some document conversion the other day, I ended up in a situation where I had the JSON I needed, but in a completely unreadable format. Luckily, this problem is very easily fixable .... when you know how. So today's post is a quick recap on how I did that using jq, a very handy command-line tool for working with JSON. For the impatient, here's the command:
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Open Standards for APIs
09 October 2024
Read moreI work or have worked with APIs of all sorts of standards, sometimes many standards at once - or none. Each standard exists for a purpose and might be a great fit, or a terrible fit for other purposes. Today's post is a recap of some of the common API standards around and what you need to know about each one.
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Lint APIs with Redocly CLI
05 August 2024
Read moreAPI governance needs good tooling, and rules that fit - so today's post covers both.
Fun fact: I work at Redocly and had used the tool for years, but recently realised that I have a post about a different tool in the archives of my blog, but no Redocly post. So here's the Lorna-recommended version of OpenAPI linting with Redocly CLI.