Developer portals for the modern developer

As the role of digital engineering products grows at all modern companies it has become imperative to maintaining documentation of the entire catalog. A developer portal is a singlular place to showcase both internal and external digital applications, APIs, services, etc. to be consumed and used. Creating a developer portal is a critical piece in enabling discoverability of these products and services.

Many companies both large and small face issues of discoverability of applications, APIs, and services that exist to be consumed. This difficulty leads to duplication of efforts on many occasions and also causes standardization of certain business logic and data difficult to attain. A developer portal is as critical to developers and customers as Github and source control is for code.

The current state of what many companies call an "API Portal" is simply a collection of Swagger or OpenAPI specifications and little more. While this is a good start, and a critical component of an effective developer portal it is not comprehensive enough. API specifications do not tell the whole story and fail to adequately define the bigger picture.

A developer portal allows teams accross a company or enterprise to publish their digital APIs, Applications, Services, SDKs, and more to be discovered by other teams at the company or customers. This discoverability is crucial to ensuring standardization of services and demonstrating to developers what tools are available to them. Truely effective developer portals involve both formal and informal documentation and guides to help developers learn how to interact with digital products.

A developer portal is a website that provides access to information, resources, and tools that help developers build applications or integrations with a specific product or service. Developer portals often include documentation, tutorials, code samples, API references, and other resources that developers can use to learn about the product or service and start building with it. Some developer portals may also include forums or other support channels where developers can ask questions and get help from the community or from the product team. Developer portals are typically aimed at providing a comprehensive, user-friendly experience for developers who are interested in working with a particular product or service.

Empowering developers to build the future with the customizable developer portals is quickly becoming necessary with the explosion of microservices