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.
While Postman is convenient, it’s hard to use it to represent how to make calls with it in your documentation. Additionally, different users probably use different GUI clients, or none at all (preferring the command line instead).
Instead of describing how to make REST calls using a GUI client like Postman, the most conventional method for documenting request syntax is to use curl.
curl is a command-line utility that lets you execute HTTP requests with different parameters and methods. Instead of going to web resources in a browser’s address bar, you can use the command line to get these same resources, retrieved as text.
Sometimes curl is written as cURL. It stands for Client URL. “curl” is the more common convention for its spelling, but both refer to the same thing.
Installing curl
curl is usually available by default on Macs but requires some installation on Windows. Follow these instructions for installing curl:
Install curl on Mac
If you have a Mac, by default, curl is probably already installed. To check:
Open Terminal (press Cmd + spacebar to open Finder, and then type “Terminal”).
In Terminal type curl -V. The response should look something like this:
Installing curl on Windows involves a few more steps. First, determine whether you have 32-bit or 64-bit Windows by right-clicking Computer and selecting Properties. Then follow the instructions in this Confused by Code page. Most likely, you’ll want to choose the With Administrator Privileges (free) installer.
After you install curl, test your version of curl by doing the following:
Open a command prompt by clicking the Start button and typing cmd.
In Windows, Ctrl+ V doesn’t work; instead, you right-click and then select Paste.
Notes about using curl with Windows
If you’re using Windows, note the following formatting requirements when using curl:
Use double quotes in the Windows command line. (Windows doesn’t support single quotes.)
Don’t use backslashes (\) to separate lines. (This is for readability only and doesn’t affect the call on Macs.)
By adding -k in the curl command, you can bypass curl’s security certificate, which may or may not be necessary.
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.
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