API Stylebook: A Collection of Resources for API Designers

My friend Arnaud Lauret (@arno_di_loreto), the API Handyman, has released a very cool new project called the API Stylebook — a collection of resources for API designers. It is a brilliant aggregation of twelve API design guides from Atlassian, Cisco, Cloud Foundry, Haufe, Heroku, Microsoft, PayPal, Red Hat, The White House, and Zalando.

I think the API Stylebook purpose describes it well:

"The API Stylebook aims to help API Designers to solve API design matters and build their API design guidelines by providing quick and easy access to selected and categorized resources.

In this first version, the API Stylebook provides direct links to specific topics within publicly available API Design Guidelines. Instead of reinventing the wheel or searching google for hours, API Designers quickly can find solutions and inspiration from these existing guidelines."

The API Stylebook isn't just a list of API design guidelines from these companies, it is a machine readable distillation of the twelve API design guides into a master list of API design topics you can consider when crafting your own API design guide. It is slick. I like Arnaud's approach to analyzing the existing API design patterns across API platforms who have shared their guides. I also really like the approach to breaking things down as YAML, and publish as a very good looking website using Github, and Github Pages.

I'm hoping it is something that will stimulate other API providers to craft and share their own API design guide. If you do, I'm sure Arnaud would add to his work, especially if you use his work as a blueprint for your design guide — keeping things as standardized as possible. Projects like this are critical to the growth of the space, and a lack of resources like API Stylebook, and Webconcepts.info have seriously slowed the consistency and interoperability across the world of APIs.