First Developer Experience

In my last article, I’ve written a little bit about my new role as Developer Relations at Hash. Today I’m going to explore a task that I’m working on: Improving the experience of the developer that is working inside one of our clients integrating Hash, which technically translates to: somewhere inside our client there is someone integrating with Hash API. If you don’t know what an API (application programming interface) is, here’s a brief explanation:

“Hash APIs are a list of commands. When a program uses one of those commands, Hash analyzes them and then send back what was requested”

At its current state Hash API Documentation works mostly like a dictionary: If you know what you want, you can go to a word (a command in the analogy above) and understand how to use it. This is really helpful if you know what word you are looking for, but if you have never done this before, probably you will spend some time asking questions to people with experience and also doing some trial-and-error tests to understand how to connect the pieces.

As we are preparing for new customers to join our base, the Support Team at Hash has contacted me so we could take a look at the experience of the developer that will integrate Hash. If the integration path is well done, this helps the support team to minimize the number of support requests that they will get from clients using our API.

I started out by putting myself in the role of developer from a new client that needs to integrate with Hash API and do the most common flow: swiping the card in a point-of-sale to make a transaction. After a couple of weeks, we have built a documentation that covers and explains all this process. About a month later we already have a couple of “business requests” written that our Tech and Product team will prioritize and tackle in order to improve some structural points in our API.

I feel like we are still scratching the surface of our API developer experience and we are already hyped for the result. We are still finishing up the first batch of documentation and we hope to make it public soon. I’ll surely write about our experience with deploying all the initiatives I’ve described and go more in detail for each one of them. As of now we still have plenty of solutions to sketch, deploy, and iterate and our team has many open roles for people looking for new challenges!