Although I don’t work in road ecology or traffic engineering, the author somehow pulled me through 300 pages on this topic. He managed this not just through vivid language and diction, but by personally visiting places and telling stories about the specific challenges that animals, “carers,” forest service workers, and others faced as freeways and highways bisected and dissected their environments.
To use an analogy, suppose you’re a barista making espresso coffee. An AGI-capable robot trained as a barista is able to make all the coffee that a regular barista can make but twice as fast. Further, the Android barista can create exquisite espresso art in any shape that humans request, wowing them and making the experience novel. Soon the human barista is replaced. After all, the paying customer would rather pay $2.50 for a robot to make a latte instead of $5.00, especially when it tastes the same.
Most code samples in documentation are fairly basic, which is by design. Documentation tries to show the most common use of the API, not advanced scenarios for an enterprise-grade app whose complexity would easily overwhelm developers. (At that point, you end up with a sample app.)
With AI tools built directly into your authoring tool or IDE (such as VS Code), fixing simple doc bugs can become a mechanical, click-button task. Here’s the approach to fixing simple doc bugs:
(Note: The fact that I’m writing a book review on this topic might seem odd given that I usually focus on tech comm topics. However, I document APIs for getting map data into cars, so I sometimes read books related to the automotive and transportation domain. I also run a book club at work focused on these books.)
During the past few weeks, I’ve felt like my brain’s RPMs have been in the red zone. Granted, the constant stream of chaotic political news hasn’t helped—but regardless of current political events, I’m frequently checking the news, my email, and chat messages and operating in a mode that isn’t great. Reading long-form books has proven to be difficult. I run a book club at work focused on automotive and transportation books, and it took me two months to make it through a single book (granted, it was a 300-page historically dense book, but still).
“Biohacking” might be a pretentious cyber term for what is otherwise a straightforward experiment. For 10 days, I tracked my food and exercise levels while also wearing a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to track my glucose levels. I then used AI to pair up the food + exercise with the glucose readings and perform an analysis about triggers for glucose spikes and recommendations to avoid them.
I want you to act as my AI stream journal (similar to a bullet journal), for the day. In this chat session, I’ll log 3 kinds of notes: tasks, thoughts, and events. Tasks are to-do list items. Thoughts are random ideas or notes I have. Events consist of food eaten, exercise, or descriptions of my internal states. The point is to have an easy way to dump all the scattered information in my head into a central log that you organize and analyze on my behalf.
Almost every API has a method in place to authenticate requests. You usually have to provide an API key in your requests to get a response. Although we’ll dive into authentication and authorization later, we need to get some API keys now to make requests to our weather API.
Requiring authorization allows API publishers to do the following:
License access to the API
Rate limit the number of requests
Control availability of certain features within the API, and more
To run the code samples in this course, you will need to use your own API keys, since these keys are usually treated like passwords and not given out or published openly on a web page.
Click Sign Up in the top navigation bar and create an account.
After you sign up, your API key is sent to the email address you provide.
You can also find your API key on the site’s Developer Dashboard. (To find your API key on the site, return to the OpenWeatherMap homepage and click Sign in. After signing in, you’ll see the developer dashboard. Click the API Keys tab (highlighted in the screenshot below).
API Keys tab on OpenWeatherMap Developer Dashboard
Copy the key to a place you can easily find it.
(Note: It can take an hour or so for a new OpenWeatherMap API key to activate.)
Get the Aeris Weather API secret and ID
Now for contrast, let’s get the keys for the Aeris Weather API, using a free developer account. The Aeris Weather API requires both a secret and ID to make requests.
Click Sign Up for Developer. (The free developer version limits the number of requests you can make and expires in 30 days.)
Complete the required fields to sign in. Click the activation email as well.
After you sign up for an account, sign in and go to your Dashboard.
Click Apps, and then click New Application.
In the Add a New Application dialog box, enter the following:
Application Name: My biking app (or something)
Application Namespace: localhost
Click Save App.
After registering your app, you should see an ID, secret, and namespace for the app. Copy this information into a place you can easily access since you’ll need it to make requests.
Keep in mind how users authorize calls with an API — this is something you usually cover in API documentation. Later in the course, we will dive into authorization methods in more detail.
Make sure you have a text editor
In the upcoming activities, you’ll work with code in a text file. When you’re working with code, you use a text editor (to work in plain text) instead of a rich text editor (which would provide a WYSIWYG interface). Here are a few choices for text editors:
These editors provide features that let you better manage the text. Choose the one you want. (My preference is to use Sublime Text when I’m working with independent code samples, and Atom when I’m working with Jekyll projects.) Avoid using TextEdit since it adds some formatting behind the scenes that can corrupt your content.
About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.
If you're a technical writer and want to keep on top of the latest trends in the tech comm, be sure to subscribe to email updates below. You can also learn more about me or contact me. Finally, note that the opinions I express on my blog are my own points of view, not that of my employer.
