Tag Archives: api

20 Jun
2023

Visualise OpenAPI with Blockly

Giving talks about OpenAPI often means lots and lots of slides of YAML. In fact, one of my talks even contains a “warning, contains yaml” slide! If you aren’t a professional yaml developer, it can be difficult to digest and learn from, and so I wanted to do better. The various elements are nested inside one another, and so I had this idea to build a representation of OpenAPI using Blockly (the tooling also used for Scratch, if you’ve seen that).

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12 Jun
2023

Tips for better documentation with OpenAPI

I love documentation, which is supposed to be rare for software engineers. I am pretty sure that loving documentation is actually very common, but not very cool and so few people admit to it! I love reading good docs, and so I love writing them too. Between hanging out in the Write the Docs community, and recently being at the APItheDocs conference, I’ve answered a bunch of questions about getting good documentation from an OpenAPI document, so I thought I’d round them up in case it’s useful. Continue reading →
16 Nov
2020

Making SDKs a Value-Added Experience

I’ve been working with SDKs quite a bit this year, simple ones that wrap a bunch of API endpoints. The best bits of these SDKs isn’t just the delightful developer experience of using the clunky endpoints with the elegant SDK wrapping them. I mean, it is, but I already wrote about consistent and Delightful SDKs for Nordic APIs; today I want to cover the some of the “extra” things that make a big difference in the APIs. Continue reading →
06 Aug
2020

Creating a Simple OpenAPI Spec

Having API descriptions in your workflow is a game-changer, but how do you get from nothing to a functioning spec in the first place? I recently made a very simple spec for a very simple API, and thought it might make a good example for anyone looking to create a spec for the first time. OpenAPI specs are very verbose so this very tiny API makes quite a manageable example! Continue reading →
23 Jul
2020

Using Environments in Postman

I’m using Postman more lately and showing off the Environments feature really often. I really like this feature for giving easy ways to handle values I use frequently, but it seems to be a bit of a hidden gem, so I thought I’d write about when I find it useful, in case you do too! Continue reading →
22 Jul
2020

Planets and Webhooks: a simple Flask app

As a Developer Advocate for an API company, I spend a lot of time talking about APIs and webhooks and HTTP in general. Recently I’ve been focussing on HTTP tools, but I really wanted a very simple example API that I could use that would return JSON but really let me focus on the tools, not the API. So I created a “Planets and Webhooks” API with a couple of GET endpoints to return JSON data, and another endpoint to receive and log incoming webhook data. Continue reading →
18 Feb
2020

Teach Your API Test Platform to Send Callbacks

I already wrote about using Prism as an API test platform but I didn’t include an example with callbacks so this post is to fill that gap! If you didn’t read the previous post, the tl;dr is that Prism is a nodejs open source tool that can take your OpenAPI specification and then do an impression of your live API, validating the API calls sent to it and responding with the example data described in the spec. It can also follow up the API response and send an HTTP request of its own to mock the callbacks described in your OpenAPI spec. Continue reading →
13 Aug
2018

Using Config Files with Ngrok

I’m a huge fan of Ngrok, a tool to create a secure tunnel to your laptop. It is brilliant for testing, well, anything running locally really. Someone asked me about my setup recently and I’m using a couple of config files to keep things quick and consistent, so I thought I’d share here what I shared with them.

You can use a central config file for ngrok, and/or specific config files for each project. I use both, so I’ll show you around my setup. Continue reading →

22 May
2018

Relative Links with IBM Cloud API Gateway

I work quite a bit with serverless tech, particularly on IBM Cloud since I work there. At the moment I’m building a microservice using web actions. When a user creates data with a POST request, I want to redirect them to the URL of the new thing they created – but for that I need to know the URL that it was accessed with. This is a relatively new feature on API Gateway so here’s a quick howto for grabbing that URL in both JavaScript and PHP. Continue reading →