Hi all! It's been a minute. :) Let's quickly run down what you've missed me doing in the past few weeks.

P.S I have written a couple of articles that may never see the light of day, but who knows? I may still publish it here later on. Anyway, back to API documentation.

OpenAPI Specification and Stoplight

I’ve finished chapters 4 & 5 of Tom Johnson’s Documenting APIs and one thing I’ve discovered during my study is that Stoplight is an easier and faster alternative if you’re looking to produce API documentation fast and you’re short of time. I really do think that while YAML or JSON has its benefits, Stoplight may be the better alternative if you’re looking to save time for the most part and OpenAPI may not be as comprehensive as Stoplight.

In addition, Stoplight allows you to visualize your API lifecycle management and import your JSON code, helping you define the JSON schema for the code.

It’s just a much better tool than writing the raw JSON code or YAML. So like selecting a framework to make your work faster and easier, you can choose this tool to make API documentation better.

Testing out APIs in the coming weeks should be a lot of fun. Scoured through Github and found some interesting repos that I can contribute to. Here’s a couple of screenshots of the responses I got when I asked if I could contribute to the API documentation.

It’s a mix of Python and JavaScript. So it should be fun. I’m super happy to get started on these and properly document everything I learn or refine properly. So follow for more info!

Hashnode’s Documentation Tool

I want to try out, experiment with and review Docs by Hashnode. It’s a new documentation tool I came across the other day and I must say, Hashnode’s team is putting in the work! Some notable brands like freecodecamp are using this tool and a bunch more other ones:

It’s relatively new, but I’m excited to try out its headless mode, GraphQL support, and how easy it may be to set up API references. I might just write a separate article on this, analyzing its strengths and what I feel they may need to work on.

More Technical Writing Resources

Damilola Ezekiel wrote a great piece on numerous technical writing tools, books, courses, communities, Open-Source projects you can contribute to, and a whole bunch more. It’s good.

Damilola Ezekiel’s Technical Writing Resources is a good guide if you’re starting out in technical writing or you’re interested in learning more about it as it contains useful resources for technical writing. It provides valuable resources that currently has over 170 Github stars and counting.

This made me smile. Not because I found one of the best resources for technical writing, but I also discovered it’s from a fellow Nigerian. 😭 I love it! I love seeing my people shine in the tech space and I will toot their horn for the world to see.

Thank You!

Thank you for joining me on this journey thus far, I appreciate you for reading and engaging with my content. Let me know in the comments below your thoughts, suggestions for any improvements, and feedback. I’d love to hear it.

See you in the next article! ❤