Workshop: APIs and SDKs—Breaking Into and Succeeding in a Specialty Market

Documenting application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs) is a challenging but rewarding niche in technical communication. In this session, we'll discuss what these types of products do, who uses them, how you can move into this area, benefits / drawbacks to working on these products, some of the issues unique to these products, and commonly used help authoring tools.

Writers should consider this area as the demand is often greater than the supply of writers; hence you can get higher pay than for other types of writing. Also, you often get greater flexibility in telecommuting / working remotely when doing this type of writing. Sample source code and the documentation produced from them by commonly used tools will be shown.

You will learn:

• What APIs and SDKs are and who uses them.
• The benefits / drawbacks to documenting these types of products.
• Training sources for getting knowledge you need to move into this area.
• Some of the issues unique to this area and commonly-used tools.

Ed Marshall is an independent consulting writer, with 20 years experience writing and producing documentation for highly technical products including Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Java-based products, Software Developer Kits (SDKs), Web Services, and other tools for developers. He is the sole proprietor of Marshall Documentation Consulting. Ed has presented talks on source code control, developer documentation, and editing / proofreading at the local and international levels of the STC.