2 posts tagged with "Tools & Methods"

Before 2020, I dealt with API as a Consumer with intergration purposes, using only such tools as Swagger UI, Postman, and Insomnia. Since 2020, I have changed my side. And not as an API Producer but one who gives the Producers tools to build APIs. It's about the API Platform.

So, back then, I started my journey to learn more about API and Platform design. And it is far from being over. I can say that I know more than an average person with business analysis background about that topic. But I can't call myself an expert anyway.

During the recent webinars, there was a question about what I can suggest to learn about APIs. With this article, I address that question but in a different form. Instead of a reading list, I decompose the last three years of my career and describe what I did and keep doing to learn about APIs being an API Platform Product Manager.

This article is a part of the API Design series, where I will review several API design tools and summarize my experiences. There are the following criteria I use in selecting and evaluating the tools:

• it is free: either open source or a free plan of a paid product
• out-of-the-box functionality is considered only: no plugins
• both web and desktop products are considered
• it allows designing REST API definition in OpenAPI 3.x with JSON/YAML (low-code), UI means (no-code), or a combination of both
• code generation functionality is not required as there are several 3rd party libraries to do that

I am not promoting, just expressing my honest opinion. But I might have my favorites. Also, I will describe these tools at the moment of December 2022.