APIs, Networking & Integration Topics
API design, management, and integration patterns including REST, GraphQL, and other protocols. Covers API contract design, versioning strategies, error handling, idempotency, deprecation planning, and SDK/integration frameworks. Includes system-to-system integration, webhook patterns, and integration platform considerations. Excludes network infrastructure and network-layer protocols (see Network Architecture under Cloud & Infrastructure or a dedicated networking category if needed).
Developer Documentation and Tools
Covers the full scope of developer experience around a technical platform, including platform stability, API documentation, developer tooling, and software development kits. Candidates should be prepared to discuss endpoint documentation patterns, request and response examples, error handling guidance, authentication and authorization documentation, rate limiting and quotas, and migration and changelog management. Include practical aspects such as code samples in multiple languages, example applications, SDK design and maintenance, developer testing tools, and integrations with modern documentation toolchains like OpenAPI and GraphQL schemas. Also cover how documentation quality and developer tools affect adoption and support burden, metrics for measurement such as search success rate and example usage, strategies for keeping examples current, versioning and backward compatibility challenges, and holistic approaches to improving developer experience beyond API design.
API and Reference Documentation
The skills and judgment involved in producing precise, usable developer facing reference material. This covers writing and organizing API reference pages, endpoint descriptions, parameter and schema explanations, sample requests and responses, authentication and error handling guidance, code snippets and SDK examples, tutorial to reference linkage, versioning and compatibility guidance, and translating code or specifications into consumable prose. Also included are practices for validating examples with subject matter experts, using specification driven tooling, and choosing patterns that help developers onboard quickly.
API Documentation Best Practices
This topic covers best practices for documenting application programming interfaces so that developer users can discover, understand, and integrate with services reliably. Candidates should discuss clear and discoverable reference pages that include concise descriptions of endpoints, parameter definitions, request and response formats, and status codes, along with example requests and responses. Address documentation of authentication and authorization flows, pagination, rate limiting, idempotency, and error handling, as well as versioning and deprecation policies. Candidates should explain how to leverage machine readable specifications such as the OpenAPI specification to generate synchronized reference documentation and code samples, strategies for testing and validating example code, and continuous integration workflows to keep examples and specifications up to date. Also discuss audience segmentation with quick start guides for beginners, tutorials for common tasks, and deep dives for advanced integrators, and how to measure developer success through metrics like time to first successful call, error rates, and developer support volume.