Best New DX Innovation - DevPortal Awards 2022

In this article, learn about the DevPortal Awards, this year’s judges, and why we won the Best New DX Innovation 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 New DX Innovation

The Best New DX Innovation category showcases trend setters that introduce new ways to boost developer experience, in discoverability, onboarding, developing, support, maintenance that should become the new normal for all developer portals.

The following questions indicate the award criteria for this category:

• Have you found a new or innovative way of solving a user experience problem?
• How does your devportal lead the way in boosting developer experience?
• Do you address developers differently (for example, do you pay attention to specific subgroups)?
• Is there something about your users' journey of API discovery that should be celebrated?

Why we won

Judges emphasized that “after creating an account, their guided onboarding process allows developers to set up a demo site in a single click, without having to validate your email address. This removes most of the onboarding friction and allows developers to discover and test their product in a few minutes.”

We strive to continuously pay attention to everything that impacts the developer experience on the platformOS developer portal like our target audience, onboarding, contribution, editorial experience, user research, our community, accessibility, inclusiveness, and sustainability. So this is a complex task that involves everyone’s work and input from our team and our community that we are very thankful for.

User Experience

• Audience: Our main target audience is front-end developers and business owners/site builders. Our audience combines technical people with various levels of programming skills - like experienced developers, CTOs, junior developers, as well as non-technical people who come to our docs to evaluate if platformOS might be a good fit for their projects - like project owners, business analysts, and project managers.
• Onboarding: The platformOS Developer Portal provides comprehensive onboarding journeys to the three main segments of our target audience. Our onboarding has been recognized by the Best Onboarding award at the DevPortal Awards 2021.
• Contribution: To make it very easy for all segments of our target audience to be involved, we offer a number of ways to contribute, taking into consideration the time contributors have, and their skill level. For some quick editing, like fixing typos or adding links, contributors can edit the content easily on the GitHub UI. For heavy editing, adding new content, or developers who prefer to use git, we provide a complete Docs as Code workflow. We thank all of our contributors by giving recognition to them on our Contributors page as well as on our GitHub repository’s README page. We provide a Contributor Guide, Style Guide, and templates for different content types.
• Editorial workflow: We provide a complete docs as code editorial workflow and our documentation works with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). On every code merge to our main branch our CI/CD of choice, Github Actions, runs quality checks to ensure that the website will remain operational after the changes are deployed. We are excited that our editorial workflow has won the Best Editorial Experience award at the DevPortal Awards 2021.
• Accessibility: We plan for accessibility from the outset during the initial design phase, and regularly test for accessibility with various tools - further validated by our Documentation site’s very high to often perfect scores in Google Lighthouse, Wave, and AChecker. Besides the technical requirements for accessibility, we think inclusive and accessible language is just as important. This is why we have added accessibility guidelines to our Style Guide and regularly review our content for inclusiveness.
• Community: We communicate with our amazing community through many different channels such as our community site, Slack support, and regular video conferences. We keep our community members in the loop by regularly sharing status reports outlining what we’ve achieved, what we are working on, and what we are planning for the near future. Our status reports also include calls for contribution and research participation, and the results and analysis of UX research. We share updates regarding new features, improvements, and fixes in our release notes, and we regularly share articles about best practices and general news on our blog.
• User experience research: Besides getting constant feedback from the community through the channels described above, we plan regular checkpoints in our process to facilitate testing and course-correction. During development activity we tie these checkpoints to development phases. At the end of each larger release we conduct user interviews and compile and share a short survey for community members to fill out. This helps us clarify the roadmap for the next development phase.

Sustainability

Based on total ICT emissions compared with carbon emission by country, if the Internet was a country, it would be the 7th largest polluter. What’s even more alarming is that the electricity consumption and carbon emissions from our digital lives is on a sharp increase. This is why we want to emphasize the importance of sustainability when building websites.

Some of the factors we pay attention to in order to make our developer portal sustainable:

• Green hosting
• Performance
• Image management
• Video management
• Fonts
• Web caching
• User experience
• Navigation, search
• Content management
• Search engine optimization
• Third-party tools
• Maintenance

Many of the best practices we follow are just as beneficial for the people as the planet, for example, achieving the best possible performance or providing the best user experience tailored to the needs of our audience.

Based on the Website Carbon Calculator, our developer portal runs on sustainable energy and is cleaner than 95% of websites tested. On Ecograder, the platformOS Developer Portal scores 100 out of a possible 100 points.

We believe it’s imperative to decrease the carbon footprint of our digital lives. As platformOS facilitates building apps and websites, we would like to lead by example and show how a developer portal can be sustainable without ever compromising on user experience.

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