At ReadMe, we are constantly working to improve the experience for our customers writing documentation, and the end users that are consuming it. Our driving mission is to make APIs easier to use for everyone, no matter what level of technical ability they may have.
ReadMe strives to make developers’ lives easier and we are obsessed with creating a delightful developer experience. We made huge strides toward these goals in 2019 and are only just getting started!
Making APIs Easier to Use
APIs are complicated. It can be hard for even the most experienced developer to get started with a new API, and different APIs can often be wildly different from each other. Our goal is to enable every API to be easier to use, independent of its design. To go a step further, we want every API on ReadMe to be easy to use because the creator chose us.
We already have quite a few features that make this possible:
- Auto-generated code samples that update as the user enters values in the API Explorer.
- Showing a user’s real API Keys.
- Showing API Logs directly in the Reference section.
With minimal setup, these features reduce the friction of making an API call and make it easier to debug what happened if it’s not working as expected.
This year we plan to release even more features that give super powers to documentation:
- API onboarding that walks new users through making their first API call.
- Curated, use-case-based examples that show users various ways to use an API, with code samples they can easily copy.
- Integrations with support tools to easily share API Logs and diagnose what the issue may be on a specific call.
- Bringing the documentation and the API closer together so ReadMe can adapt to the specific user. If a user is just getting started, the docs should behave differently than for a seasoned user who's encountered a specific error for the first time.
- And much, much more!
Improving the Core Product
We plan on vastly improving some of the main interactions that our customers have with ReadMe. We'll release new versions for two of our most important features—our markdown editor, and our API editor.
Our current markdown editor is as old as ReadMe, and while it’s served us well, we know we can do better! We want to make a Markdown-focused editor that's a delight to use and is much more extensible. The editor is one of the main ways admins interact with our product, and we want to focus on making it great!
We are also redoing our API editor! Currently if you document an API in ReadMe, you can either document it by importing an OpenAPI Spec (OAS) file, or by documenting it in ReadMe’s UI. But, once you make that initial decision, you are bound to it forever. We want our API editor to understand OAS, which would allow us to easily view any API in the OAS format, or in a visual editor—regardless of how it was imported to ReadMe.
And that's not all! We will continue making improvements to documentation sites in small, but still meaningful ways. Some other things we are planning this year:
- Improved mobile support.
- API Explorer improvements.
- Focus on performance.
Want to Help?
We now publish our full product roadmap at https://feedback.readme.com so you can always stay up to date on what is being worked on! Leave feedback, add your own suggestions, and subscribe to get notifications when features are released!
Does working to improve APIs across thousands of companies sound interesting to you? Are you obsessed with developer experiences and want to help us build the future of APIs? We’re hiring for a bunch of roles at https://readme.com/careers and can’t wait to hear from you!
