Best DevPortal Beyond REST Platforms - DevPortal Awards 2022

In this article, learn about the DevPortal Awards, this year’s judges, and why we won the Best DevPortal Beyond REST Platforms award.

DevPortal Awards 2022

The DevPortal Awards showcases and celebrates innovative developer portals and the teams behind them.

The jury of respected industry experts looks for developer portals that deliver the best solutions available today, and that push the boundaries of what are believed to be the key components of a developer portal into the future.

In 2022, 41 developer portals were nominated in 15 categories. Each nominee competes for the best overall and the community prizes.

Developer Experience

• Best Community Outreach & Support
• Best Findability of Products in a DevPortal
• Best Onboarding
• Best API Reference Documentation
• Best Visual Design

Operational Excellence

• Best Accessible DevPortal
• Best International & Localized DevPortal
• Best use of Analytics in a DevPortal
• Best New DX Innovation

Business Alignment

• Best DevPortal Beyond REST Platforms
• Best DevPortal for Citizen Developers (Low/No-Code)
• Best served API Business Model
• Best use of Monetization

Best Overall Developer Portal

• Best SME DevPortal
• Best Enterprise DevPortal
• Community Prize

Judges

The DevPortal Awards are a peer-reviewed award where jury members are invited and assigned to categories according to their expertise. In 2022, 11 judges worked on assessing the portals:

• Alex Akimov: Passionate about great Developer Experience and all components of it: intuitive API design, versatile developer tools, simple and comprehensive technical documentation, empowering developer community and authentic developer relations. Alex, as Head of API at Adyen was responsible for APIs that processed more than €500BN in 2021. Currently he is building an API Platform at Monite. Follow him on Linkendin and Twitter.

• Alvaro Navarro: Developer Advocate and Open Source lover, Alvaro worked for over a decade developing and advocating technologies at companies such as Airbus and Amadeus. He is currently working as Developer Advocate at Spotify for Developers, serving as a bridge between external developers and the engineering team. One of his main tasks is ensuring developers have the best Developer Experience possible when using Spotify technologies by building prototypes using Spotify APIs or writing documentation and tutorials.Follow him on Linkedin and Twitter.

• Anne Gentle: Anne is an industry-recognized author whose books promote collaboration among developers and writers. She works as a developer experience manager at Cisco DevNet, the developer program for Cisco platforms to connect, secure, and automate. With her team of experts, she supports developer tools for API design, developer documentation, and developer education including infrastructure integration. She wrote a book called Docs Like Code to demonstrate developer tools and workflows like GitHub and automated publishing and code integration, applied in the technical writing world. She proudly serves on the Workforce Advisory Committee at Austin Community College, pushing the field towards future opportunities in API and developer documentation. Follow Anne on Linkedin and Twitter.

• Anthony Roux: Anthony leads the Developer Relations team at Miro, helping developers build the future of collaboration. Before that, Anthony worked 10 years in the travel industry, 8 of them working on developer-facing products. He built and led the DevRel and API Product Management team at Amadeus, helping startups make travel stressless and accessible to everybody. In his free time, Anthony loves skiing, hiking, and traveling. Follow him on Linkedin and Twitter.

• Anthony Sansone: Anthony has spent 20+ years in the computer hardware, software, and services, specializing in data protection and user security. He has broad experience developing and maturing people and processes in IT groups and departments. His experience ranges from startups to large multinational companies. Follow Anthony on Linkedin and on Twitter.

• Bob Watson: Bob is Senior Technical Writer at Amazon Web Services. Through combining his extensive industry experience and academic research Bob aims to prepare tomorrow's engineers and technical communicators for the diverse challenges they'll face as professionals. You can read his blog at Docs By Design, where he ponders technical writing, API documentation, and the world in general.

• Leah R. Tucker: Leah’s worked in various roles within the tech industry for 15+ years as: a web developer documenting UX standards for her team at HP, a programmer writer launching developer communities to drive documentation at AWS, a principal/staff writer designing APIs at Sabre and developer experiences at Stripe, a principal product manager of an API program and developer portal at Sabre, and as a software integration engineer, where she puts her different experiences into practice as a consultant by making developer experiences as frictionless as possible. Follow Leah on Linkedin and Twitter.

• Matthew Revell: As founder of Hoopy, Matthew provides DevRel strategy consulting and developer targeted content to help clients across the world understand, reach, and work with software developers. He is also the founder of DeveloperRelations.com, the world's largest library of DevRel content, as well as founder of the DevRelCon global conference series. Follow Matthew on Linkedin and Twitter.

• Meenakshi Khatri: Meenakshi has been working as API Product & Business specialist across various Fintech companies for over 12+ years. She brings a broad range of professional experience in launching API-as-a-product and services, roll-out API Innovation transformation programs and building API-related Phygital experience across various industries. Previously worked as Java developer for 6+ years; she understands how to explain Technical jargons easily to the non-technical folks and closely monitors the design and development of APIs in providing best-in-class solutions for customers.In her current role, she works as Global Product Manager, where she launched API Innovation program across Financial services and Card Issuance services and Leads the development of API-innovation solutions to serve global markets. Follow her on Linkedin and Twitter.

• Michael Meng: Michael is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Merseburg University of Applied Science, where he now teaches courses on text analysis, text production, research methods and cognitive psychology in the B. Eng. and M. A. programs in Technical Communication. He presents regularly at conferences such as the European Academic Colloquium on Technical Communication, Write the Docs, or the annual tcworld/tekom conference. Follow Michael on Linkedin.

• Sophie Rutard: Sophie has been working as API strategist for Allianz Trade (formerly Euler Hermes) for years, creating the first customer-facing API of the trade insurance industry, and putting in place a support team and developer portal accordingly. She also has been significantly contributing to EH’s digital transformation program, which resulted in a fully API and cloud-centric IT strategy that is currently being rolled out as a multi-year initiative. In her current position she is Program Manager for Datahub, which is the Backbone of the IT Target Platform in terms of real-time Streaming, Enterprise Datawarehouse, strategic KPI calculations and Data Lake / Algorithm Management Platform; It furthermore includes the Group Data and API governance teams. Follow Sophie on Linkedin.

Best DevPortal Beyond REST Platforms

In this category, Judges are looking for developer portals that can unify interfaces from across a range of technologies, to create a systematic developer experience, and combine cataloging and documentation of individual assets with sense making and storytelling to help developers discover the right affordance for their project.

They ask questions like:

• How coherent is your offering, do you help developers to create a mental model or system map of your interface landscape?
• Do you help developers to find an easier lower maintenance way to implement an experience (e.g. through an SDK or widget you maintain and support), even if they came looking for an API?
• Are you offering libraries or other technical resources outside of OAS files?
• Do you offer asynchronous APIs?
• Do you have non-API interfaces?
• Are you providing interfaces for data collections, AI, or IoT, or for still another type of developer platform?
• Do your SDKs offer a range of options to developers?

Why we won

This year, we tied for first place with Aiven. The jury appreciated the PlatformOS portal’s offering for developer flexibility, and the open explanation of the offered 3rd party API integrations.

GraphQL is a domain-specific language that we have baked into the core of platformOS along with Liquid markup, both of which are open-source frameworks. We have clear documentation for both, not just the open-source documentation that we synchronize with, but additional support and examples that have really helped our ecosystem of developers get up to speed. We facilitate developers, who wish to learn best practice, to transition from older frameworks to experiencing the power and flexibility of GraphQL, especially when combined with the “APIs-for-Everything” devops-in-box ecosystem offered by platformOS.

Onboarding

To date, we have developed three main onboarding journeys for the three main segments of our target audience.

• Non-technical users can go through the 1-click route that takes them through registering on the Partner Portal and then, by clicking through an intuitive and simple setup wizard, have them create a demo site and install the blog module in just minutes.
• Semi-technical users can create a sandbox in which they can experiment by cloning a demo site from our GitHub repository.
• Technical users can follow a more complex tutorial that walks them through the steps of creating an app on platformOS, such as setting up their development environment, syncing with github, deploying and testing their apps, and more. It explains basic concepts, including giving insights into the main building blocks and the logic behind platformOS, while also giving recommendations on best practice workflows

Developer Guide

Our Developer Guide provides detailed descriptions of concepts, step-by-step tutorials, references, and examples for implementing various features on platformOS. It starts with an overview of what platformOS is, and then includes in depth topics covering the recommended development workflow, explaining directories and files in the codebase and how to use our command line tool, and getting developers acquainted with our support. These topics help developers create a mental model of our platform, and lay the foundations for confidently using platformOS.

Topics are grouped by features (e.g. Pages), ordered by difficulty (from beginner to advanced), and are cross-referenced to related subsections and topics. Sections usually start with the description of the concept and related background information, then offer one or more tutorials for beginners, and more complex tutorials for advanced users. This makes sure that developers can find all information related to a feature in one place. All topics include code examples, developer tips, and best practice guides where applicable.

Best Practices

In the Best Practices section, we collect articles and tutorials from experienced platformOS developers across a wide variety of topics, including code quality, development workflow, performance, testing and QA.

Although topics in this section are primarily aimed at experienced developers who might want to fine-tune various aspects of their process, beginners can also benefit from reading the articles, helping them form a better understanding of the underlying concepts behind platformOS and starting to implement on the PaaS with a best practice approach.

Use Cases

Use cases describe in detail how we implemented a feature, a module or a web application in platformOS. They describe the problem, the challenges and solutions, and always provide insight into our decision-making process: Why did we decide on one technical approach over another? What factors did we consider? What are the current industry best practices?

Use cases include links to related documentation topics, resources related to the topic (e.g. articles), all assets we used (e.g. templates), example code in our GitHub repository, and live demos.

Thank you to the organizers for all their work behind the scenes, and the judges for providing their expertise and for the amazing effort in evaluating all the nominees in the various categories. We are honored and grateful for such great recognition. We would like to thank all members of our team and community who contributed to our developer portal. We couldn’t have achieved this without all of you.

Related

• Interview with the DevPortal Awards Jury 2022
• Best Developer Portals 2022