Dev rel behind the firewall
summary
Experience from building over 30 developer portals identifies five concrete failure modes called the five White Walkers of motivation: poor discoverability, inconsistent domain language, missing design standards, absent docs, and fragmented authentication. Fixes include a central API registry with metadata, harmonized domain language and taxonomies, style guides plus automated linting and review tools, required documentation workflows, and federated or centralized auth. Focus on the upstream developer journey as well as downstream work and add lightweight gamification to boost adoption.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Why developer portals matter
- 3:57Reasons organizations build APIs
- 6:47Why internal APIs are hidden
- 8:34Five demotivation factors
- 16:33Fixing issues behind firewall
- 19:22Upstream vs downstream journeys
- 23:26Processes for API scale
- 24:29Call for more talks
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