The API developer experience describes the overall perceptions and emotions a developer has while interacting with an API. It encompasses the infrastructure, tools, processes, support, and other touchpoints that contribute to an enjoyable and frictionless experience for developers integrating APIs into their applications.
The API developer experience is one aspect of delivering an optimized developer experience across every touchpoint on your platform. By reducing friction for developers, software engineering leaders can improve developer productivity for internal teams and accelerate adoption of their APIs and tools by external developers.
When designing APIs, these are fundamental questions to ask:
- Functionality – What does the API do?
- Usability – How easy is the API to use?
- Experience – How does it feel to use the API?
In a developer-centric world, it’s important to have an API strategy that encompasses every stage of the API lifecycle, and to create a positive experience. Identifying who will interact with the API, defining how the API functions, optimizing its usability, and enhancing the API’s overall feel are all important considerations when designing your API developer experience.
You can learn more about the API developer experience in our blog Why the API Developer Experience Matters.
How Can NGINX Help?
API Connectivity Manager, part of F5 NGINX Management Suite, was designed with the API developer experience at its core. With API Connectivity Manager, infrastructure teams can deploy high‑performance API gateways and developer portals. And developers can rapidly publish and manage APIs and documentation or discover and onboard APIs into applications.
API Connectivity Manager is a key part of the NGINX Secure API Connectivity solution, which provides these benefits:
- Fast onboarding – Integrate with your favorite identity provider to streamline authorization and authentication on the developer portal
- Simple documentation – Use the OpenAPI Specification to automatically generate documentation for the developer portal when APIs are published to the API gateway
- Interactive learning – Enable developers to discover, test, and learn your APIs with an integrated API explorer on the developer portal
- Workflow automation – Integrate API publishing and management into your CI/CD pipelines using the fully declarative REST API
Start a 30-day free trial of NGINX Management Suite, which includes API Connectivity Manager and Instance Manager.
