by David I | Aug 9, 2017 | APIs, Cloud Computing, DevRelate, Programming |
When a developer’s app is built using one or more remote services and a problem occurs, users will start reporting a problem. Users will not necessarily know what is causing the problem. It could be issues with a cloud based service’s API, a cloud storage system or a bug in the software. How can your app know what the problem? Developer programs that provides services and APIs should also provide a live, frequently updated status page. Providing status APIs and pages allows the software, developers, partners, ISVs and even end users to track down problems. Ultimately the solution to any problem is the responsibility of the app developer (and company) regardless of where the fault is. Well designed and implemented developer programs should provide an API to check status and receive notifications for apps to fail-over, recover, fail gracefully and display problem information and solutions to users.
Developer System Status Pages
Here are a few developer program system status pages that I’ve found in my research and assessments. Some sites also provide APIs, feeds and subscriptions to program and API status information.
Status Page Hosting and API services
Altassian, for example, provides to customers a status page hosting service and API. You can find details of the developer service at https://www.statuspage.io/. Here is a list of some of the companies that use the hosting and API service:
3rd Party Status Check Sites
There are several 3rd party status check sites that monitor popular sites and provide an edit box to input a URL. You can use these services to see if another site/service is up or down. Some, like DownDetector, provide APIs (for a fee) to check on service status.
Do you provide a service status page and status API as part of your developer program?
If you have your developer service status and API, send me an email with additional information and the links to the status page and API.
David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/
by David I | May 30, 2017 | APIs, DevRelate, Webinar |
This week, I am presenting a DevRelate webinar, “Developer Relations and your Company’s APIs” on Wednesday (May 31) and Thursday (June 1). This blog post contains additional information and links covered in the webinar.
APIs and Your Company
Developer Relations and APIs
API Documentation Examples
API Versioning – Overview
REST
- URI
- Request parameter
- Media type (aka content negotiation & accept header)
- Date
- Custom request header
- Domain name
SOAP
- XML namespaces and XML comments
- UDDI version aware service registry
Shared Code Files
- Filename
- Version resource
API Resource Links
API Documentation Generation Tools
Additional Swagger Resources
The following Swagger related links were provided by SmartBear Software (thank you Keshav and Tracy)
- [Blog] API Design Best Practices – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-design/api-design-best-practices/
- [Blog] What is API Design, and Why it Matters – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-design/what-is-api-design/
- [Webinar] Scaling your API Design Process – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-design/scaling-your-api-design/
- [eBook] Optimizing the Swagger collaborative workflow using SwaggerHub – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-resources/optimize-your-swagger-api-workflow/
- [Blog] Design first or Code first approach to APIs – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-design/design-first-or-code-first-api-development/
- [Webinar] API Developer Experience (DX), and good documentation practices for good DX – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-documentation/api-documentation-and-developer-experience/
API Versioning – Examples
Facebook / Parse (BaaS) API Shutdown Example
Evans Data Developer Program Workshops and Assessments
If you have additional API links, best practices, tools, tips, tricks, thoughts and questions, send me an email.
David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/
by David I | Dec 6, 2016 | Developer Programs News, Developer Relations, DevRelate |
In today’s interconnected world, companies in all industries need to publish APIs and cultivate a developer community to access and use them. To be competitive today, attracting and supporting developers is essential. The key to cultivating a vibrant developer community that uses your APIs and supports your platform is a good developer relations program. “Developer Programs and APIs in the News” is a series of news items from developer programs around the world.
Developer Programs and APIs in the News
Netflix – December 5 – NetFlix announces a new Open Source project called Hollow – “Hollow is a java library and comprehensive toolset for harnessing small to moderately sized in-memory datasets which are disseminated from a single producer to many consumers for read-only access. Hollow shifts the scale … datasets for which such liberation may never previously have been considered can be candidates for Hollow.”
OpenAI.com – December 5 – Openai.com releases Universe – Universe is “a software platform for measuring and training an AI’s general intelligence across the world’s supply of games, websites and other applications. Universe allows an AI agent to use a computer like a human does: by looking at screen pixels and operating a virtual keyboard and mouse. We must train AI systems on the full range of tasks we expect them to solve, and Universe lets us train a single agent on any task a human can complete with a computer.”
Amazon AWS – December 1 – Introducing AWS X-Ray: See Inside of Your Distributed Application – “We have made it possible for you to trace requests from beginning to end across all of the touch-points that I just mentioned. It addresses the problems that come about when you want to understand and improve distributed systems at scale, and gives you the information and the insights that you need to have in order to do this.” Developers can use Node.js, Java, C# .NET, and AWS Lambda function (any programming language).
GE Digital – December 1 – Minds + Machines 2016 Hackathon Recap – “On Tuesday, November 15 at Minds + Machines 2016, 18 teams competed in a Predix Hackathon showcasing the power of the platform. The GE Developer Relations team was excited to partner with GE Energy Connections, GE Power, Intel, and the GE Digital Foundries to host the very first Hackathon specifically for the yearly event. Overall, 85 developers attended the Hackathon and delivered 18 outstanding hacks, completely packing the house.”
Facebook – November 30 – Instant Games Now Available on Messenger and Facebook News Feed – “Instant Games, launching in closed beta, opens up a unique opportunity for game developers to lower the friction for people to discover and instantly enjoy playing games without having to install new apps. Using only one build that will run in web view, developers can easily deploy their Instant Games across multiple platforms to reach the 1.79 billion people on Facebook, as well as 1 billion people on Messenger. Facebook News Feed posts also include the Instant Play call-to-action to help drive distribution and discovery of new games.”
Google – November 30 – Customize your G Suite experience with App Maker and Recommended apps – “App Maker is a low-code, application development tool that lets you quickly build and deploy custom apps tailored to your organization’s needs. Whether you’re looking for better ways to onboard new team members, staff projects, or approve employee travel requests, App Maker helps you build an app for that in days instead of months.”
SYNQ – November 29 – Synq announces their Cloud Video API for Developers – “Our flexible video API enables developers to create new scalable video services, or move existing solutions in hours. We offer extensive and easy to use documentation and a range of code libraries. Create new scalable video services, or move existing solutions in hours.”
GitHub – November 28 – Preview the new Organization Memberships APIs – “We’re releasing new endpoints and changes to existing endpoints to better help you administer your GitHub organizations and repositories.” New endpoints include: Review a user’s permission level, List outside collaborators, Remove an outside collaborator Convert a member to an outside collaborator List pending organization invitations and List pending team invitations.
Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Linux Foundation – November 16 – Microsoft contributes to open ecosystem by joining Linux Foundation and welcoming Google to the .NET community – Microsoft Corp. unveiled a series of products and partnerships that strengthen the company’s Azure cloud platform for building intelligent, cross-platform apps and services. Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie detailed significant steps Microsoft is taking to empower the ecosystem by giving developers greater choice in the tools they use — including joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum Member to better collaborate with the open source community, welcoming Google to the independent .NET Foundation, and working with Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. to enable .NET developers to build apps for more than 50 million Samsung devices worldwide.
Intercom – November 15 – Connecting developers and customers with the new Intercom Developer Program – “Today we’re launching our new Developer Program, which recognizes and promotes quality integrations. The Program will help our customers discover and use integrations built by the community, as well as helping us better support you, the developers building them. Today more than 13,000 businesses use Intercom to connect with a billion people worldwide.”
Airobotics – November 14 – Airobotics Launches Developer Program to Create an App Store for Automated Drones – “Airobotics, a global leader in fully automated industrial drones, is announcing the launch of its official developer program, a new initiative that provides third-parties with the ability to design and develop software that will be integrated into and operated by its drone platform. With this announcement, Airobotics is opening the first ‘App Store for Industrial Drones’, for which any developer or company may develop software utilizing Airobotics’ automated drone platform.”
Send me your Developer Programs News!
If you have news about your Developer Relations Program, send me an email about the news.
David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
by David I | Oct 27, 2016 | Cloud Storage, Developer Relations, DevRelate, Essential Features, Programming, Tools |
All developers require a Developer Relations Programs to follow the “3 C’s” – Community, Code and Content. To this list of C’s I also add a few of my own: Collaboration, Continuity, Cooperation, Communication, Caring, Celebration, Civility, Consideration, Clarity, Conversation and Curiosity. In surveys, during conversations, in emails and as the most commonly asked webinar question, developers tell us that Code is King! Even though we provide documentation for SDKs, APIs, libraries, frameworks, systems and applications, the ultimate documentation is the source code itself. The Computer History Museum (CHM) collects the source code for great computer software programs and systems. Do you want to download the source code for MacPaint and QuickDraw created by Bill Atkinson? You can download them both and you can read the story behind the software too! I love what CHM is doing to preserve the source code artifacts of our industry’s history. Developers tell Evans Data that source code examples, sample projects and tutorials are some of the top requirements for a successful developer relations program. So, the question is, where should you put your sample programs so that your developer relations program members can find it, download it and use it?
Developer Relations – where to put your sample programs, tutorials and source code?
There are several places that Developer Relations programs put there source code. Some programs keep their code on their own servers (ftp or http access), some put code in public repositories and others put their source on code hosting sites. There are many sites to choose from including: Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Storage, GitHub, SourceForge, DropBox, Cloud Forge, Box, CodePlex, Google Drive, Assembla, BitBucket, ProjectLocker, and LaunchPad. Most of these sites support the leading source code version control services including Subversion, Git and Mercurial. Some of the hosting sites will also provide additional tools and services like defect tracking, deploy/install, security scanning, and license compliance audits. Several of these sites are popular places to put open source software projects allowing the developer community to collaborate and enhance the sample code. Some of the sites also provide APIs (GitHub Developer for example) for you to automate interactions, search catalogs of entries, access control, and more. Other developer programs place source code on sites to make it simple to distribute and update the code. Most integrated development environments and programmer’s editors support pulling sample code from repositories.
Where do you put your Developer Relations program and products sample code?
Send me an email and tell me where you put your developer relations program code.
David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
by David I | Oct 17, 2016 | Developer Outreach, Developer Relations, DevRelate |
During my Evans Data Developer Relations Conference 2016 technical session, “Best Practices for a World Class Developer Relations Program”, I presented a slide that was titled “DevRel Program in the Cloud”. The ideas on the slide included the cloud based resources (many that are free) that could be used to run a “virtual” developer relations program using readily available services. Here is the list, with links, for the services I talked about during that portion of my presentation.
DevRel Program in the Cloud
- Content Sharing/Storage – You can place your white papers, articles, blog posts and other files on many different sharing sites including: Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, etc. Check out the article “Free Cloud Storage” on thebalance.com.
- Videos – Every company can have a YouTube channel and most do. You can organize your videos into playlists, track subscribers, watch times, and more. Facebook also allows video uploads and streaming.
- Webinars – There are many ways to give live video presentations and webinars. Here are a few of many: FaceBook Live, YouTube Live, LiveCoding.tv, Skype Group Video and Twitch for Developers.
- Feeds – to track developer news, articles, competitors and more – there are many RSS feed readers and systems available including: Feedly and InoReader. There are many others.
- Questions & Answers – StackOverflow is the one you want to definitely use for developers. StackOverflow is the first place most developers go to ask questions and find answers. Remember to use tags appropriate to your company, brand, products and services.
- Feature requests – Wantoo, Userback just to name two free and fee services. You should also check out Uservoice. There are many others you can try.
- Code Sample repositories – Here are the “big four” if you need version control for your code samples (see content sharing/storage above if you just need to put files up for download) – GitHub, SourceForge, BitBucket, CodeProject.
- Event Calendar – TeamUp and Google Calendar just to name two. Also check out Bitrix24.
- Social Marketing Sites – create your own pages, groups and more – the top four to definitely use include LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook, Google+.
- Social Marketing Tools – Buffer and Hootsuite have free service levels.
- Newsgroups – Google Groups, Tumblr, Google+, Reddit (Note: when your Reddit account is more than 30 days old and you have acquired a small amount of positive karma, you can create a subreddit of your own)
- Finding content about your company, products, services – Google Alerts
- Meetings/UserGroups – meetup.com – find like minded developers and visit with them or create your own meetups, schedule meetings and go meet with developers.
What cloud based services do you use for your DevRel program?
There are so many cloud based services that can help you run your Developer Relations program. I have only quickly scratched the surface about what is possible. Send me an email and let me know what cloud based services work for your Developer Relations program. davidi@evansdata.com
PS: Check out my recent blog post about the tools and services I use for developer evangelism.
