Code to contract to code: making ironclad APIs

If you’re providing customers with an API, then you’ve got to make sure that API is well-documented, and that the documentation is actually accurate! If you really want to make your API easier to use, you should provide users with API clients (or SDKs) in various languages. Again, those API clients should be well-documented, and those docs should actually be accurate!

Too many times, engineers spend precious hours and energy fixing inaccuracies in their API clients or documentation. As the server changes, old clients and docs get out of sync with the server in production. But why manually update your software when you could automate it? Instead, generate API docs directly from your API server code. And if those docs are machine-readable, then you could even generate API clients from them!

I used to do all this the manual, toilsome way. As a recent convert to the power of generated schemas and clients, let me show you how to set up a system like this, to reduce your toil and free up valuable work hours.