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.
Redoc is a popular display framework for the OpenAPI as well and is a favorite by many API gurus. Redoc started out as a API doc site for Rebilly docs but with many customizations evolved into its own unique framework. Redoc provides a three-panel layout made popular by companies such as Stripe.
The makers of Redoc spun off into their own company (Redocly) and developed a more robust hosted solution offering (see From ReDoc to Redoc.ly). As with both Stoplight and Swagger UI, Redoc offers both free and pro versions to adjust to your needs. And you can add topics beyond just reference docs.
Activity: Use Redoc Community Edition to render OpenAPI spec
In this activity, you’ll render your OpenAPI spec with Redoc.
Copy the following code into an empty text file (in a text editor such as Sublime Text) and save the file as redoc.html. (Note: This code comes from Redoc’s “TL;DR” readme instructions on GitHub.)
Make sure you save the file with a .html extension so that your browser will render it as HTML.
Change the value for redoc spec-url to a valid OpenAPI spec that is available at an online URL.
If you were following the previous tutorial on creating an OpenAPI spec through Stoplight (Getting started tutorial: Using Stoplight to create an OpenAPI specification document), you can use the OpenAPI URL that Stoplight provides. From your Stoplight display, go to the Overview topic and click Export OpenAPI. Choose either original or dereferenced. Copy the URL. Here’s an example URL.
Exporting an OpenAPI URL
In your web browser, click Cmd + O (Mac) or Ctrl + O (Windows), locate your redoc.html file, and select it.
The display should look as follows:
Sample Redoc display
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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