
Ask HN: Best Documented Web APIs and Integrations? - philippz
Title contains the questions. There are so many documentations of various styles out there.<p>Which are the best API documentations you know? Comprehensiveness, Readability, Usability&#x2F;UX, Look&amp;Feel, extensive use of standards... whatever factor makes it special&#x2F;favourable.<p>Looking for role models.
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ryanwaggoner
Stripe, Parse, Twilio, SendBird.

This is a good overview of the different things that make up great docs:
[https://zapier.com/engineering/great-documentation-
examples/](https://zapier.com/engineering/great-documentation-examples/)

I think a great developer docs experience is a _really_ tough thing to do
well. You need to have great design, great writing, and great tech. The
existing docs platforms out there (like Readme.io) all suck (especially for
anything beyond REST API docs), so you really need to roll your own.

I've done some consulting in this area for clients who wanted amazing docs
experiences, so ping me if you want some more ideas / feedback.

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davedx
Stripe is probably the best I've used, though there are so many products and
features these days you can get a bit lost sometimes.

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philippz
I also enjoy Stripe. When we did our website, we generally took Slack & Stripe
as examples.

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gm
Follow up question: Is there a framework for creating and maintaining these
API docs, or is it hand-coded?

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maxiloc
Maxime from Algolia here. There is a lot of things out there to build docs.
(Sphinx, readme.io, jekyll, middleman, web frameworks, ...).

All those tools are good at what they do. When you want to do something very
specific/custom, you will always end up needing something outside the scope of
those products.

So far at Algolia, middleman is the one we're using for our main
documentation. We had to tweak it a lot and reimplement some parts but it
works and we should be able to keep it running for a while.

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shash7
Airtable has a pretty awesome api documentation.

Basically, when you create a table and see its api documentation, it is
generated on the fly to show you the rest endpoints specific to that table
only.

Pretty awesome actually, worth checking it out.

Stripe has good api docs too.

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levyelad
[https://docs.particle.io/reference/api/](https://docs.particle.io/reference/api/)

Amazing IoT startup and amazing documentation

