Do you provide Swagger YAML and JSON files with your APIs?

Every developer has their own swagger based on their background, education, coding style, programming language used, etc. In this blog post I am talking about a different kind/type of Swagger.

When developers are interested in using an API provided by a operating system, platform, service, cloud, or device vendor, I’ll bet that one of the first things they will search for is to see if there is an API binding for their favorite programming language. Or, maybe your developer program members are the type of developers who just need the REST/JSON calling information? Where possible, I like to use client and server language bindings, components or frameworks for my development projects. Wouldn’t it be great if all APIs included great documentation and also YAML and/or JSON files for the APIs?

Swagger to the Rescue

With the Swagger YAML and/or JSON files I could use Swagger’s CodeGen tool to create bindings for more than 20 server side languages and more than 40 client side languages. That would be awesome. With Swagger supporting a range of tools, both the API developer creator can build their APIs using their programming language of choice and the API developer consumer can use their favorite programming language.

My one simple statement is “If your API supports REST and JSON then you can Reach out to Every Developer“. The text statement on the Swagger site say it succinctly – “Swagger is the world’s largest framework of API developer tools for the OpenAPI Specification(OAS), enabling development across the entire API lifecycle, from design and documentation, to test and deployment.” While most developer program APIs support some common languages including Java, C++, C, C#, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby and Python, there are many other programming languages that also support REST and JSON web services. Why would you intentionally make it harder for developers that use other programming languages?

REST/JSON based APIs work with just about every programming language

My REST/JSON and APIs blog post on the Evans Data DevRelate community site includes links to REST/JSON supporting information for additional programming languages. It’s time for more developer program APIs to make it easier for developers,  using all programming languages, to build applications.

The statement on the Swagger CodeGen tool site says it so well – “Build APIs quicker and improve consumption of your Swagger-defined APIs in every popular language with Swagger Codegen. Swagger Codegen can simplify your build process by generating server stubs and client SDKs from your Swagger specification, so your team can focus on your API’s implementation and adoption.”

Do your Developer Program APIs include Swagger support?

Do you provide you developer program APIs with Swagger YAML and/or JSON files? Send me an email if you do and I’ll be very happy to pass along the word to developers.

 

David I

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://devnet.evansdata.org/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99

 

DRC 2017 recap: “Our Journey to a Growing Developer Program”, Susie Wee – Cisco

Susie Wee, VP and CTO of DevNet Innovations at Cisco Systems, gave a presentation at our recent 13th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference. The following is a recap of her session, “Our Journey to a Growing Developer Program”. [David I note: the graphics used in this blog post were not part of the presentation slide deck]

Susie started her session by asking the audience a few questions to understand who was attending and what they wanted to get out of her talk. A great way to start any presentation in order to make any “course corrections” to help the audience.

Cisco DevNet APIs

Susie mentioned that the Cisco DevNet developer network started about 3 years ago. Before that time Cisco had a series of APIs and SDKs for developers but no real developer program and community. What Cisco had was more of a partner community to resell Cisco products. Certifications were offered for the partners. You could ask a couple of questions about the early outreach to developers: why does Cisco have a developer program and isn’t Cisco a networking hardware company?

She explained that Cisco DevNet is a developer community and an innovation ecosystem. Technologies that are available to developers include: Internet of Things, Software Defined Networking, Cloud computing, Collaboration technologies (many developers will recognize Cisco Jabber), Security solutions, Data Center offerings, DevOps solutions, Services and Open Source.

As part of Susie’s talk and also the main focus on the upcoming DevNet Create Conference (May 23-24, 2017 in San Francisco, CA), one of the main themes follows the sentence template of “Where Applications Meet xxx”. Developers who build applications should be able to easily fill in the “xxx” with some of the following: Infrastructure, Things (IoT), Places, People, Design, Architecture, Microservices, Deployment, Security, Analytics, etc. Between the apps that are developed there are interfaces to connect those apps to, well, everything! That is part of what Cisco provides beyond their traditional networking solutions.

Cisco DevNet Create

Susie explained how Cisco DevNet focuses on helping developers:

 

She mentioned that DevNet has more than 415,000 members, who work in more than 24,000 companies, provides 252 learning labs, provides 80 active APIs and more than 170 yearly developer outreach events.

Key to the success of Cisco DevNet are a laser focus on solving three key challenges: how to operate as a developer program, provide a clear value proposition for developers, and continue to grow a fiercely loyal developer community.

One of the stories that Susie mentioned was how DevNet attached itself onto the popular Cisco Live conferences that are help throughout the world. They put together all of their developer learning materials and created a DevNet zone on the side of the main conference. Attendees walked past the area and started telling their friends that there are cool learning labs over in this corner of the conference area. The buzz started to spread among attendees that there was a lab where you could develop software to integrate with Cisco technologies. John Chambers and his Cisco management team stopped by and saw what was happening in the DevNet theater and hands on lab. Now, at Cisco Live, the DevNet zone is the busiest section – Cool!

DevNet – 5 Lessons Learned

Susie shared the 5 lessons that they’ve learned during DevNet’s journey:

chalkboard-1927332_640

5) Operate like a startup and build up your developer credibility

4) Play to your strengths and build a technically talented “extended” team

3) Make your developer members heroes inside their companies and also in their communities

2) Help your team be wildly successful and ensure that your community has a heart

1) Innovate, Innovate, Innovate.

Innovate or Be Left Behind

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Developers have to solve big problems. A developer program’s mission is to help developers build innovative solutions for their companies and their customers. Your developer program has to continue to provide innovative features, content and tools that will help your developer members create innovative applications. Our industry moves forward, fast. Developers move forward, fast. If your developer program does not innovate to keep up with developer needs, your company and your developer program will be left in the dust.

Thank you, Susie Wee and Cisco, for being a part of our 13th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference.

Additional Information

Cisco DevNet  – https://developer.cisco.com/

DevNet Create Conference (May 23-24, 2017 in San Francisco, CA)

Susie Wee’s session live stream replay is available on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ciscodevnet/videos/1962907540605184/

Session Title: DevNet: Fostering innovation where applications meet infrastructure

Session Description: How did a networking company start behaving like a software company and build a thriving developer community? How is DevNet achieving scale by engaging a broader internal and external community? The mission of Cisco DevNet is to provide developers with the tools, resources and code they need to create innovative, network-enabled solutions. But it’s more than just the technologies – DevNet is fostering innovation to help developers create seriously cool stuff. Join Susie Wee as she shares the successes, challenges and lessons learned in building a successful joint developer and innovation program, as well as what’s next for the DevNet community.

SusieWee

Susie Wee – VP and CTO of DevNet Innovations at Cisco Systems

 

Bio:

Susie is the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of DevNet Innovations at Cisco Systems. She is the founder of DevNet, Cisco’s developer program for infrastructure and application developers, which catalyzes innovation by the developer ecosystem. DevNet covers the breadth of Cisco’s portfolio including networking, cloud, data center, security, collaboration and IoT. The innovations from DevNet improve end user experience, the operational experience and developer experience with the network. Under her leadership, the DevNet community has grown to over 400,000 developers in less than three years.

Prior to her current role, Susie was the Vice President and Chief Technology and Experience Officer of Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group where she was responsible for driving innovation and experience design in Cisco’s collaboration products and software services, including unified communications, telepresence, web and video conferencing, and cloud collaboration. Before joining Cisco, Susie was the founding Vice President of Experience Software Business and CTO at Hewlett Packard, and Lab Director at HP Labs. Susie was the co-editor of the JPSEC standard for the security of JPEG-2000 images. She was formerly an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits, Systems and Video Technology and IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. While at HP Labs, Susie was a consulting assistant professor at Stanford University where she co-taught a graduate-level course on digital video processing.

Susie received Technology Review’s Top 100 Young Innovators award, ComputerWorld’s Top 40 Innovators under 40 award, the Red Dot Design Concept award for augmented collaboration, the INCITs Technical Excellence award, the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame award, and was on the Forbes Most Powerful Women list. She is an IEEE Fellow for her contributions in multimedia technology and has over 50 international publications and 57 granted patents. Susie received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

Developer Relations Best Practices and Tools of the Trade – Webinar Info and Links

As part of my DevRelate webinar presentation, “Developer Relations Best Practices and Tools of the Trade“, I am providing the links to the tools, websites, bloggers and other resources that I used for each of the seven best practices I cover in this week’s webinar. As I mention in the webinar, Evans’s Data Tactical Marketing – Developer Marketing and Developer Relations Programs – developer research reports provide hundreds of best practices that could have covered. Since I have to start somewhere, I’ve started with seven. My plan is to cover additional best practices and tools in future DevRelate webinars. Stay tuned to the DevRelate blog for news about additional webinars, dates and times.

Evans Data Tactical Marketing Reports

You can find the table of contents and a few sample pages from each report on the pages linked below. Contact our salesx team if you want to purchase the reports. The release schedule for all of our 2017 research reports can be found at https://evansdata.com/reports/release_schedule.php

 

Seven Best Practices

Seven Best Practices Covered in this week’s Webinar

  • Social Media
  • Blogs
  • Newsletters
  • Webinars
  • Videos
  • Documentation
  • Answers

 

Social Media

Blogging tools:

Books:

  • The Art of Social Media, Power Tips for Power Users – Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick – http://artof.social/

 

Blogs

 

Blogs for developers and DevRel professionals (you should also follow and collaborate with):

Thought/Tech leader blogs:

 

Platform/Language blogs:

 

News/Press blogs/articles:

Newsletters

  • Word Press Newsletter Plugin – free plugin to add newsletter features to your WordPress based site or blog. Integrates with WordPress standard login form.
  • Newsletter Archive Plugin Extension – adds a smart tag that you can put on a page to create and update when you create new newsletters.
  • Oracle Eloqua – cloud based marketing automation driving dynamic journeys.
  • Marketo – marketing automation for companies of any size.

Webinars

Videos

Documentation

  • MediaWiki – open source wiki project written in PHP. Used by Wikipedia and Wikimedia. You can use the Book Creator extension to select Wiki pages and create a book. You can use the Collection extension to create collections of Wiki pages and export them as a PDF or a book. You can take your collections and have a book printed on demand by PediaPress.
  • Calibre – free, open source e-book management tool for creating and converting content for eBooks. You can create and edit eBooks for major eBook formats. It also has a feature to synchronize eBooks to book reading devices.

Answers

 

Email me if you need additional help, links, tools, info

You can find additional tools and links that I use on my earlier blog post, “Developer Relations Tools of the Trade“. I will keep updating this blog post throughout the week. If you have tools, links and other resources to add, send me an email.

David I Facebook Avatar

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/