Ask HN: What are best practices to building a developer experience?

4 points by parthi 6 years ago | 1 comment

We're opening up integrations on our platform so developers can build on top of us. What matters to you as a developer when interacting with a 3rd party API? Would appreciate any pointers to good developer experiences (I like Slack and Stripe) and how to think about implementing them

Top of mind is: - Comprehensive documentation - Interactive APIs - Easy to test - Easy to get keys, register webhooks, etc to setup OAuth - Fast approval if needed - Stats on your API usage

Jugurtha 6 years ago |

We have an internal platform. I'm writing the SDK before the API. My success measure is the following: I should be able to build a clone of the platform using the SDK. Anything I can do with point and click, I could do with the SDK or sending a request. I should be able to build a CLI that manipulates the platform and does all one can do with the web application. I should be able to fork myself, then hire that fork to write a separate front-end that uses our API, feature match the current product, and have a better user experience. I should be able to use the platform as a building block to something else, and it should be trivial.

Once this is possible, it means that almost all the logic is in separate functions, and not intertwined to the "web" application. Which means these functions are more easily tested, and can easily support whatever CLI/"RestfulAPI" one wants.