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I infact constantly find the opposite.

APIs documentation and forums help the lay-coder, but don't help me at all with trying to pin down a wire-format, or clear up an ambiguity in the docs.

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Yes, because lot of people don't make the job to go out of the building and talk to their users. They make a neutral interface, for everybody. This is why sometime their API seems not consitent with the real need that they solve for your application/business.

This is one of the reasons we built Runscope (yes, shameless plug). Seems like no amount of documentational diligence will completely prevent wire gremlins. Whether its faulty SDKs, typos, etc. if you can't see what's on the wire and share that with the party on the other end you'll waste hours debugging unfixable problems.

Your frontpage seems to have an &emdash; encoded incorrectly.

Thanks, it's fixed now.

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