"No developer in their right mind wants a developer portal" | Hacker News Reader

"No developer in their right mind wants a developer portal"

12 pointssevedkim4 comments

This was a quote I heard from a platform PM. And he was right! It reminds me of the similar quote: "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!"—Theodore Levitt

It might be a tough pill to swallow but:

No one wants your platform. No one wants your tool.

What developers actually want is what your product enables them to do. Shipping faster, feeling more autonomous, mastering their craft.

Developers don't want a developer portal. Developers want to be better developers.

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I wonder what the definition of "developer portal" is here exactly... It's definitely possible to make a bad one by requiring an onboarding process to access it and hiding information from the public, but I think there's room for good too. As long as your goal is to make integration work easier and not to gate things behind a registration process, a developer portal has the potential to be a good thing.

A little while ago I worked on an integration where I had to implement API endpoints with specific functionality defined by the integration partner, and I found the test functionality they built into their developer portal very helpful. Rather than having to write tests based on their documentation to verify I was implementing the endpoints correctly, I was able to test against the real code on the other side of the integration.

Honestly for companies that require you to log in before accessing API docs, I imagine the decision is being made by non-developers. I suspect the alternative would be getting a PDF emailed to you after having to ask a real human for it.

They don’t want a quarter inch hole, they want a lazy sunday afternoon bbqing with their family and showing off their beautiful new outdoor decking to their friends.

As someone that gets asked to evaluate the offerings of SaaS companies from a technical perspective, before my company goes through the rigmarole of the more detailed and costly ITSEC checks and laborious business use cases, if I can’t find the documentation and API definitions publicly available then it’s red flag number 1. I don’t want to have to login, or make a developer account first. I just want to read your docs. If you haven’t got any documentation at all then I’m walking away. Don’t make me email you for it.

Agreed. I'd add a good tool, one that helps developers be better developers, also needs to help them get from where they are today to the future where they're using that tool. As in, if the tool helps, but the hurdle to start using it is too high, it's not a good tool.

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