Author Archives: lornajane

16 Nov
2025

Notification Contexts Matter

Like many of you, my days are dominated by notifications. Emails from project management systems, source control systems, calendar invitations, ticket updates, and message about messages on other platforms. I’ve noticed that some people use notifications as a power tool, while others seem blind to what happens when they do something. So this post is some tips that I’ve picked up along the way. Continue reading →
17 Sep
2025

Quick local API docs with Scalar

Today I’m sharing a quick-and-dirty script to take an OpenAPI description, spin up a docs server locally, and copy the URL into your clipboard. I also use a bit of glob expansion in my script to find the right folder, because I have a lot of APIs with long and formulaic directory names (TM Forum members know this story). I’m spinning up Scalar here as it’s my current favourite just-works local API docs platform. Continue reading →
21 Jul
2025

API Specificity with Overlays and Enums

The more I work on API standards, the more I realise how few teams understand that they can adopt the standards and, without breaking any contract, adapt them to make a strong interface for their own application. One of my favourite examples is to add enums where a standard interface cannot dictate the exact values, but in your own implementation it is very helpful to do so. Continue reading →
10 Jun
2025

Safe Screensharing Setup

In my time I’ve spent a LOT of time on screenshare, and I’m confident sharing my screen. Part of the confidence comes from maintaining a usage pattern that means I CAN confidently share my screen and rarely embarrass myself. After sharing some tips with a former colleague recently, I have tried to package up the best bits of that conversation and turn it into some tips to share. Continue reading →
05 Jun
2025

Publish to GitHub pages with Sphinx

I’m a big fan of docs-as-code for more or less any type of content publishing, but I’m less of a fan of Jekyll, the default tool used in GitHub pages. I also prefer ReStructuredText over Markdown as a markup format, so Sphinx is definitely on my shortlist of SSGs (Static Site Generators) for my projects. I recently switched the rst2pdf docs to using Sphinx hosted on GitHub pages, so here are my setup notes. Continue reading →
28 Apr
2025

Just Enough Docs

Too many open source projects suffer from inadequate documentation, and that hurts their adoption, their communities, and puts more burden on maintainers. Many people who create open source software don’t see see themselves as writers, but today I’m sharing tips for documenting open source projects without it needing to take up a huge amount of time to get something published and ready for (docs) contributions. Continue reading →
26 Mar
2025

Right-Size Your RESTful API: More Flexibility Without GraphQL

If you publish a RESTful API and there are situations when you need less (or more!) detail in the API responses from your API – then this post is for you. When I run into this with the teams I advise, the initial problem statement usually arrives more like “We need to move to GraphQL”, but this is a solution, not a problem to solve. The problem usually turns out to be either or both of:

  • the API responses are simply too large for some of the clients or uses cases, users need to select just the fields they want
  • the API doesn’t have enough information in the response payload for this client or use case, users need to choose to include nested data

GraphQL is one way to achieve these things, but this post is about the RESTful way to provide the right level of detail in an API response. Continue reading →

12 Mar
2025

Markdown/Mermaid output for OpenAPI Arazzo

API reference documentation changed the way we built integrations, and eventually became part of the driving force for OpenAPI adoption and all the good tooling that flowed from it. As a developer experience specialist, I spend a lot of time thinking about how human users can work with the technical assets in a project. HTML-format API reference documentation does a great job of building that bridge when working on OpenAPI projects, but now I’m using Arazzo and it’s a very new standard with not nearly as many tools available for that format yet – so I built one. –
17 Feb
2025

From HTTP to OpenAPI with Optic

I’ve been using Optic’s CLI, an OpenAPI tool that does a bunch of things including diffing OpenAPI descriptions and comparing HTTP traffic with OpenAPI. My use case was an established API that didn’t have an OpenAPI file yet – using Optic we could create one as a starting point, and then move to a design-first workflow to make the changes that I was there to help with. For this blog post, I’ve used the example of https://api.joind.in as an excellent representation of an API still in use, but without an OpenAPI file and not built with code that a code generator would recognise. Continue reading →
14 Feb
2025

Preview OpenAPI as HTML using Scalar

The API DevTools space is alive and well with lots of new and exciting products popping up all the time. I’ve been especially impressed by the new tools in the docs space, but some of the options are less practical for use as quick human-friendly OpenAPI renderings or previews to use during API development. My current favourite in this space is Scalar because I can get an HTML file to easily include in a build or share with others. It’s a bit of a hack though, so I thought I’d share… Continue reading →