1. Brandon
West
SendGrid
Manager, Developer Relations
@bwest
Who am I ?
brandon@sendgrid.com

2. SendGrid
Documentation
& Open Source Projects

3. Why Documentation Matters
ProgrammableWeb.com API Survey Results
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4. What Documentation Does
Developers Self Serve
Reduce Support Tickets
Establishes Credibility
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5. API Workshop
Test the API
from browser.
No code.
!
New version
coming soon!
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Reserved

6. Documentation Is Not Easy
• We are on our third version of documentation. The first 2 were bad.
• It’s a big job. We’re now hiring a person to manage it full time.
• Things are constantly changing
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7. What Makes Sustainable Documentation?
• Change tracking / version control
• Ease of deploying changes
• Maintainability of platform
• Smart constraints
• Smart defaults
• Ease of editing content
• Defined structure
• These are a lot of the same things that make code sustainable.
!
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Reserved

8. !8

9. Open Source Libraries
PHP
C#
Node.js
Obj-C
Perl
Go
Python
Java
https://github.com/sendgrid/
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10. Most Popular Libraries
PHP
C#
Based on views on Github
over the last 2 weeks
Python
Node.js
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11. Why Have Open Source Libraries?
• Reduce the amount of work it takes for new users to get started
• Developers like package managers such as npm, nuget, rubygems
• Provides example implementations even if devs don’t use them
• Lets us provide smart defaults — e.g. Web API instead of SMTP
• If we don’t build them, someone will. But we get the questions!
• It’s fun 😊
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12. Not Just API Wrappers
• Our documentation is open source! github.com/sendgrid/docs
• New newsletter subscription widget is also open source
• We’re trying to open source more projects as well
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13. Thank you !!