I’ve attended and spoke at API Days Interface online conference last week. Being online made the experience a bit different but after almost 3 days, I felt almost as usual; exhausted and my brain boiling with all what I’ve heard and seen. In this first post I share my feelings about attending and speaking at an online conference.

Ever wanted to quickly find, extract or modify data coming from some JSON documents on the command line? JQ is the tool you’re looking for. The three previous parts of this JQ and OpenAPI Series, taught us to extract data from JSON (OpenAPI) files and modify them using many filters, creating modules and using command line arguments. To finish this series, we’ll learn to color JQ’s raw terminal output and do a colored version of part 2’s search operations.

It was great to chat with Phil Sturgeon and Matt Trask on the APIs You Won’t Hate Podcast. We talked about API Design and Reviews, and we also talk about life in quarantine, as France completely shut down and how Phil made it back in time to England before the lock downs took place.

I had the pleasure to chat with Tom Johnson for his I’d Rather Be Writing Podcast. We talked about my book, The Design of Web APIs, and specifically best practices for designing web APIs and focus on the roles technical writers can play.

I started this project with a simple API Design Guidelines list in mind and ended with a fully analyzed collection of API design guidelines. I created it for others but I use it myself too. When I wonder how to handle some API design matters, I select the related topic and read how others handle it. To be honest, it needs some refresh, it is a real pain to update and maintain and could be more user friendly; that’s on my todo list.

I built the OpenAPI map because I was constantly searching for “how do this with the OpenAPI spec” and also “but where is that thing” in the specification. Having the OpenAPI specification represented as a tree given essential information and quick access to source documentation of each element saved me countless time.