API The Docs 2021 — platformOS Developer Portal Demo and Q&A

Date: October 20, 2021
Event: API The Docs conference series
Speakers: Adam Broadway, platformOS Founder and CEO, Diana Lakatos, Director of Documentation at platformOS

As the platformOS Developer Portal has been nominated in the Best Developer Portal for Alternatives to REST-APIs, Best Editorial Experience in a Devportal, Best Accessible Devportal, and Best Onboarding categories for the DevPortal Awards 2021, we have been invited to showcase our devportal and participate in a Q&A session at the API The Docs conference.

API The Docs

API The Docs is an event series dedicated to technical writers, product owners, developer advocates, and other members of API teams who want to deep dive in API documentation and explore how it relates to a great developer experience.

The organizers switched the conference format from offline to online in April 2020 and they launched API The Docs Virtual, an online event series.

platformOS Developer Portal demo and Q&A

We presented a demo of the platformOS Developer Portal followed by a Q&A. This is a summary of what we talked about:

• Introduction: We started with a brief introduction of our product, company, and community. We talked about our target audience and working as a remote, distributed team.
• Developer portal: We did a walkthrough of our developer portal and showed the different areas of the site. We also touched upon the approaches we followed to build our documentation like the Content First and Design Thinking methodologies.
• Content production: We explained how we produce content, including the main topic types we have, the templates we provide, our Documentation Style Guide, and the technical background and formats we use.
• Editorial workflow: We explained each step of our complete docs as code editorial workflow.
• Continuous integration and delivery: In the end of our presentation, we showed the steps in our CI/CD workflow and discussed automated testing.

We were happy to receive lots of positive feedback during our presentation and in the Q&A that followed. During the Q&A, we discussed user research, accessibility, and the Design Thinking approach in more detail.