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Internal APIs and developer portals

There exist a lot of material on the importance of APIs and developer portals and how they are essential for the growth of companies like Twilio and Stripe. There is less information available on APIs and developer portals internally in large organisation (and sometimes made available to their closest business partners).

The presentation "Internal Developer Portals: Developer Engagement Behind the Firewall" by Kristof Van Tomme gives a high level overview of common frustrations:

  1. Poor discoverability
  2. Domain language ambiguity
  3. Lack of API design standards and inconsistent developer experience
  4. Lack of documentation
  5. Fragmented and complex authentication
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As he also mentions, there is a lot of focus on the developer experience of API consumer but very little on API producers. In my personal opinion, if you have have a structured and easy process for API producers, you will see an significant increase in the information available to API consumers.

In this area we will look at three main areas:

  1. Developer mindset
  2. Developer experience for API consumers
  3. Developer experience for API producers