Category Archives: APIs

08 Dec
2025

Tag Kinds in OpenAPI 3.2

OpenAPI tags have always been annoying: user-supplied arbitrary data for endpoints should be a fabulous feature – but the documentation tools seem to think that tags are only for them so it becomes more difficult to use tags for other purposes. In fact it is very useful to be able to tag endpoints with lots of different categories of data and so in OpenAPI 3.2, tags were enhanced to include an additional “kind” field so that different kinds of tag could be used. Continue reading →
04 Dec
2025

Nested tags in OpenAPI 3.2

OpenAPI has always had support for simple tags, but the OpenAPI 3.2 release brought in some serious tag upgrades including a summary field, a “kind” field with registry, – and the ability to nest tags which is the focus of today’s post. If one level of organisation isn’t enough for your API (and on bigger APIs I’d argue it shouldn’t be) then the ability to indicate which tag is the parent of this tag will be a good feature to adopt when you upgrade your OpenAPI descriptions. Continue reading →
17 Sep
2025

Quick local API docs with Scalar

Today I’m sharing a quick-and-dirty script to take an OpenAPI description, spin up a docs server locally, and copy the URL into your clipboard. I also use a bit of glob expansion in my script to find the right folder, because I have a lot of APIs with long and formulaic directory names (TM Forum members know this story). I’m spinning up Scalar here as it’s my current favourite just-works local API docs platform. Continue reading →
21 Jul
2025

API Specificity with Overlays and Enums

The more I work on API standards, the more I realise how few teams understand that they can adopt the standards and, without breaking any contract, adapt them to make a strong interface for their own application. One of my favourite examples is to add enums where a standard interface cannot dictate the exact values, but in your own implementation it is very helpful to do so. Continue reading →