Alternatives to ReadMe.io

We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

• Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
• npm as package manager
• NestJS as Node.js framework
• TypeScript as programming language
• ExpressJS as web server
• Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
• Postman as a tool for API development
• TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
• JSON Web Token for access token management

The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

• Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
• Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
• A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
• Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.

We knew how we wanted to build our Design System, now it was time to choose the tools to get us there. The essence of Scrum is a small team of people. The team is highly flexible and adaptive. Perfect, so we'll work in 2 week sprints where each sprint can be a mix of new R&D stories, a presentation of decisions made, and showcasing key development milestones.

We are also able to run content stories in parallel, focusing development efforts around key areas of the site that our authors need first. Our stories would exist in a Jira backlog, documentation would be hosted in Confluence , and GitHub would host our codebase. If developers identify technical improvements during the sprint, they can be added as GitHub issues and transferred to Jira if we decide to represent them as stories for the Backlog. For Sprint Retrospectives, @groupmap proved to be a great way to include our remote members of the dev team.

This worked well for our team and allowed us to be flexible in what we wanted to build and how we wanted to build it. As we further defined our Backlog and estimated each story, we could accurately measure the team's capacity (velocity) and confidently estimate a launch date.

As a new company we could early adopt and bet on #RemoteTeam setup without cultural baggage derailing us. Our building blocks for developing remote working culture are:

• Hiring people who are self sufficient, self-disciplined and excel at video and written communication to work remotely
• Set up periodic ceremonies ( #DailyStandup, #Grooming, Release calls and chats etc) to keep the company rhythm / heartbeat going across remote cells
• Regularly train your leaders to take into account remote working aspects of organizing f2f calls, events, meetups, parties etc. when communicating and organizing workflows
• And last, but not least - select the right tools to support effective communication and collaboration:

1. All feeds and conversations come together in Slack
2. #Agile workflows in Jira
3. InProductCommunication and #CustomerSupportChat in Intercom
4. #Notes, #Documentation and #Requirements in Confluence
5. #SourceCode and ContinuousDelivery in Bitbucket
6. Persistent video streams between locations, demos, meetings run on appear.in
7. #Logging and Alerts in Papertrail

We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

• Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
• npm as package manager
• NestJS as Node.js framework
• TypeScript as programming language
• ExpressJS as web server
• Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
• Postman as a tool for API development
• TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
• JSON Web Token for access token management

The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

• Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
• Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
• A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
• Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.

Hello, I need to write documentation for my React codebase. I am tossing between Docusaurus and jsdoc. I liked everything about Docusaurus but then it doesn't seem to generate a web file like jsdoc does once the code is commented with the required tags. I was hoping I could get some advice on which tool to go with for my React application.

Hello, I need to write documentation for my React codebase. I am tossing between Docusaurus and jsdoc. I liked everything about Docusaurus but then it doesn't seem to generate a web file like jsdoc does once the code is commented with the required tags. I was hoping I could get some advice on which tool to go with for my React application.

We recently needed to rebuild our documentation site, currently built using Jekyll hosted on GitHub Pages. We wanted to update the content and refresh the style to make it easier to find answers.

We considered hosted services that could accept our markdown content, like ReadMe.io and Read the Docs, however both seemed expensive for essentially hosting the same platform we already had for free.

I also looked at the Gatsby Static Site generator to modernize Jekyll. I don't think this is a fit, as our documentation is relatively simple and relies heavily on Markdown. Jekyll excels at Markdown, while Gatsby seemed to struggle with it.

We chose to stick with the current platform and just refresh our template and style with some add-on JavaScript.