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.
Each of your endpoints (called “paths” in the spec) will be appended to the server URL when users make “Try it out” requests. For example, if one of the paths is /weather, when Swagger UI submits the request, it will submit the path to {server URL}{path} or https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather.
Options with the server URL
You have some flexibility and configuration options for your server URL. You can specify multiple server URLs that might relate to different environments (test, beta, production). If you have multiple server URLs, users can select the environment from a servers drop-down box. For example, you can specify multiple server URLs like this:
servers:-url:https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/description:Production server-url:http://beta.api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/description:Beta server-url:http://some-other.api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/description:Some other server
If you get stuck, see the sample OpenAPI spec here for the fully working sample. This will help you spot and troubleshoot indentation or other errors.
In Swagger UI, the multiple servers appear as options users can select in a drop-down list:
If you have just one URL, you still see a drop-down box but with just one option.
You can also incorporate variables into the server URL that can be populated at runtime by your server. Additionally, if different paths (endpoints) require different server URLs, you can add the servers object as a property in the path object’s operation object. The locally declared servers URL will override the global servers URL.
See “Overriding Servers” in “API Server and Base URL” (Swagger’s docs) for more details.
Swagger
Paste the servers object (the first code sample above showing just one url) into your Swagger Editor, adding to the code you already have there. Swagger UI will look as follows.
Swagger UI with the servers object
Notice the drop-down menu that appears in the lower-right. (Even if you have just one URL, it still appears in a drop-down menu.)
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.
