Documenting Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Software Development Kits (SDKs) is a challenging but rewarding niche in technical communication. This session discusses what these products do, who uses them, moving into this area, benefits / drawbacks to working on these products, issues unique to these products, and commonly used help authoring tools. As the demand is often greater than the supply of writers, you can get higher pay than for other types of writing. You often get greater flexibility in telecommuting / working remotely in this area. Sample source code and the documentation produced from them will be shown.

Attendees will learn about the skills needed to break into this area of technical writing, and be introduced to some of the tools commonly used to document APIs and SDKs.

The following topics will be discussed:

Introduce APIs / SDKs, describe them and their function. Demonstrate several examples of APIs / SDKs and point out the similarities of information provided and format among them.
Typical documentation deliverables for both types of products.
The ideal information for SDKs.
The typical reference information for APIs.
Common programming concepts that writers need to be familiar with for this type of writing.
The benefits and drawbacks to doing this type of writing.
The knowledge / personality traits that work well in this area.
Sources of training to prepare you for this area.
Logistical issues faced by writers: how you get your information, tools you can use, common formats for online help, platform issues, build and deployment issues, etc.
Some common tools used to generate the documentation from the source code, “a single source of truth” will be demonstrated, showing the source code and the documentation generated from it.
Other advanced, powerful shareware tools tthat are very useful for documenting these types of products, such as tools to compare the contents of directories / files, search and replace tools, and advanced text editors.
Factors to consider in determining which help format to use.
Determining if context-sensitive help is useful and tips for making it easier to track your context-sensitive IDs / numbers.