Source code access, consistency: some ingredients of Adyen's API program

Interview with Ruby Batallones, Technical Writer at Adyen and Aleksei Akimov, Head of API at Adyen

Involve your technical writers already from the API design discussions: this can help ensure a consistent user experience across all APIs, and in finding the middle ground between the usability requirements and the architecture requirements.

At Adyen, technical writers have the ways and means to add and maintain the descriptions in the source code, they can make sure that all the bits and pieces are linked together and enough context is provided everywhere. This practice brought that techwriters habitually use the developer tools as well, and have a deeper technical understanding of the API, which in turn enables better communications earlier on.

The recently open sourced Adyen Explorer and documentation won 2 prizes at the 2019 DevPortal Awards: Best API Reference Documentation and Best Decision Maker Documentation.

Our guests are Ruby Batallones Technical Writer at Adyen, former solution architect and implementation engineer, and Aleksei Akimov, who started his career in software development, then added technical writing, was leading the Documentation & Developer Experience team and is now responsible for Adyen API design, strategy, and governance.

The hosts are Laura Vass (Editor of Developer Portals Newsletter, Co-Founder of Pronovix) and Anett Pozsár (Senior Technical Writer, Pronovix).