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Let's Talk Docs podcast -- episode on measuring API documentation quality

by Tom Johnson on Mar 7, 2022
categories: technical-writing podcast-guest

There's a new podcast called Let's Talk Docs, hosted by Portia Burton and Eric Holscher (co-founder of Write the Docs). They recently interviewed me for episode 2.

You can listen to episode 2 on the Let’s Talk Docs site or embedded below.

In this episode, we chat about the API documentation checklist I created in my API documentation course. While discussing criteria for measuring documentation quality, we also chatted about the Developer Portal Awards from Pronovix. This year I served as a juror for the API reference, onboarding, internal portals, developer dashboard, and editorial experience categories – alongside Ellis Pratt, Bob Watson, and Lukas Rosenstock.

By the way, you can see some jury commentary about what makes for winning developer portals in a Pronovix video interview here. (My comments appear about 24 minutes into this video.)

We also chat about other topics in this Let’s Talk Docs podcast, such as writing philosophies, community engagement, and life stories, but the focus on measuring API documentation quality probably has the most emphasis.

The Let’s Talk Docs podcast (which is associated under the larger Sustain podcast) has several other episodes available as well:

I added Let’s Talk Docs to my list of tech comm podcasts here.

About Tom Johnson

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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