Summary
Being an API-first company, NS1’s API documentation is a critical component in ensuring a positive developer experience. When I joined NS1, I inherited an API documentation site built by engineers and marketers, but that continues to require refinement and maintenance within the constraints of limited bandwidth, a fast-moving development pace, and the typical communication gaps often found in startup environments. This means our API doc site improvements have been slow and incremental as we aim to improve existing API documentation while keeping up with new and improved feature delivery.
Despite these challenges, I’m always working to improve the quality — as in, completeness, accuracy, usefulness, and presentation — of our API documentation. Additionally, I’m always on the lookout for inspiration related to API and developer documentation to ensure we’re adhering to generally accepted standards and best practices.
Limitations
The API documentation site is hosted by the marketing website and is subject to marketing style sheets and processes. Unfortunately, the look, feel, and function of the API docs site is not particularly conducive to a modern developer experience. I worked with the agency managing our website to try to make some improvements while I work with the team to build a site that better serves our users. Additionally, as a one-person team, I am always advocating for more and better automation tools that ensure content completeness and accuracy. The required processes and tools to accomplish this have been identified, but are yet to be adopted by the broader team.
One of the more recent additions to the API documentation is a new section related to configuring DNSSEC & DNSSEC external keys via API. The new section includes more contextual information than what we typically include.
Refer to https://ns1.com/api for the full documentation site.