Yesterday I attended my second online meet-up of the apidays Women in APIs group. There were three discussion areas that participants moved between: APIs as a product, inclusivity in APIs (and tech in general) and API development. All three discussions were interesting and many perspectives were shared.
Of particular interest to me was Shanae’s group which focused on inclusivity. Although not specifically about APIs, I was able to contribute stories about my attempts to make readers of online end-user help feel more represented. For example, by using diverse names (beyond Mary Smith and John Brown) in screenshots and examples that feature people’s names.
This time, I felt more confident in contributing to the conversations and look forward to future meet-ups.
The docToolchain open source project I am contributing to is also going well. As of today, I have become the third most active contributor! Ralf and I continue to work well together and I’m happy to say that I am way more comfortable with pull requests, reviewing diffs and general use of GitHub. So grateful to Ralf and the project for this chance to refine my skills.
Benny, a business analyst from Nigeria has also started working on the project. He, Ralf and I had an early-morning video call this week where I shared my process for reviewing pages on the site and how I decide what to edit. Benny is keen to move more into tech writing, so he is starting on one of the parts of the site that I haven’t had a chance to touch. I will serve as reviewer of Benny’s work. Three different people from across the planet (New Zealand, Germany, Nigeria), collaborating as one team.
And finally, in my day job, my manager Bruce just asked me to start having conversations with our devs about documenting our APIs. Initial discussions reveal that they use (and prefer) a code-first approach and that most of our APIs are internal. As I write, I’m not entirely sure how to proceed and how I might apply my docs-first approach, but there’s a team meeting on Friday (I am part of the dev team) where we will be talking about standards across dev, and API docs is one of those standards.
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