A lot of developer experience (DX) is associated with public APIs, the sort you expect to be used by developers external to your company. While speaking on a virtual panel about API descriptions, the audience chat heated up with questions about internal vs external.

I’ve never understood why so many organizations don’t invest at all in how their engineers will experience internal APIs. The savings—in sheer engineering time—seems well worth a team of technical writers.

EveryDeveloper works with companies of all sizes to create great content. Yet, I was surprised to learn a previous client with nearly 10,000 employees has not one tech writer, despite multiple internal, external, and partner-specific APIs. At least this client had adopted OpenAPI specifications to describe their API.

Many organizations have good reasons to allocate budget where they do. And there may be more investment than what is visible from the outside. From my discussions with enterprise engineers, a dearth of documentation is a fair generalization.

One of the meanings behind the name EveryDeveloper is that “every developer deserves a great experience.” We believe quality, authentic technical content is the best way to improve DX.

Where have you seen developer experience lacking in your organization?