I was taking a look at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) API documentation for the VA Facilities API and intending on providing some feedback on the API implementation. The API itself is pretty sound, and I don’t have any feedback without having actually integrated it into an application, but following on the heals of my previous story about how we get API developers to follow minimum viable API documentation guidance, I had lots of feedback on the overall delivery of the documentation for the VA Facilities API, helping improve on what they have there.
Provide a Working Example of Minimum Viable API Documentation
One of the ways that you help incentivize your API developers to deliver minimum viable API documentation across their API implementations is you do as much of the work for them as you can, and provide them with a forkable, downloadable, clonable API documentation that meets the minimum viable requirements. To help illustrate what I’m talking about I created a base GitHub blueprint for what I’d suggest as a minimum viable API documentation at the VA. Providing something the VA can consider and borrow from as they are developing their own strategy for ensuring all APIs are consistently documented. https://goo.gl/Tg4Afr