developerjackHello again, and welcome to another weekly!
Blimey, what a week! I don’t think I’ve had so many high’s and low’s in one week for quite a few months but alas here we are, 7 days on and lots to share.
I’ve been musing a lot on API documentation and technical communication in general. Naturally, that’s led to a number of interesting reads – a few of which are below.
This week’s links explore best practices, API documentation, mentorship and a deep dive into Facebook’s dynamic analysis tool. Oh, and Phil Sturgeon has opinions on APIs and JSON – who knew!
Best practices are contextual
I’m often involved in discussions trying to define things like standards and best practices. In this excellent post, Larry explores the importance of context in best practices.
Read the post.Designing good static REST API documentation
I’ve been musing a lot on API documentation and technical communication (spoiler alert – I’m doing a lot in this space). This is a great summary of different approaches to designing API documentation. Most importantly, it helps weigh up the benefits and trade offs of most of the popular layouts and interaction models.
Read the post.Mentorship is the answer
I’m a huge advocate of coaching and mentoring – it’s single-handedly the best way to grow skills (both hard and soft, technical and interpersonal). While written in search for senior JavaScript developers, this is a wonderful post exploring the value and impact mentorship has on junior developers.
Read the post.Facebook’s evolutionary search for crashing software bugs
You’re probably not writing software at Facebook scale, and neither am I. That aside, I’m constantly fascinated by software quality and testing at such a large scale. This is a fascinating look inside Facebook’s app testing tools and specifically their dynamic analysis software ‘sapienz’.
Read the post.Why do people dislike JSON?
Phil Sturgeon has been known to have opinions about APIs. He raises some excellent points about liking and disliking JSON just on principle. Hopefully, you’ll find his musings on the matter just as insightful.
Read the post.Upcoming events
For any Aussie readers (and specifically Sydneysiders like myself) there’s a few events coming up you should be across. Hacking Homelessness is in 2 weeks time, and Hack4Refugees pre-announced their next hackathon will be October 27-29. There are also a handful of Web Directions events coming up.
Thats it for this week, thanks for reading!
