“Freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose – and commit myself to – what is best for me.” — Paulo Coelho

As part of the annual API the Docs Dev Portal Awards, my team spoke to our reimagining of Codat's documentation and wider developer experience.

I decided to make 2023 my year of reading. These are a few of my recent reads.

Follow me on Goodreads.

I recently read The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin. It strikes a perfect balance between the mundane aspects of real, believable human lives and exciting high magic and wonder, reminiscent of "Lord of the Rings" and other classic fantasies.

Have you ever tried to create a language from scratch? I began creating one for fun a while ago, and I've been trying to teach it to ChatGPT,. Langaf is a fictional language that is similar to English and uses a base twelve counting system.

I've long embraced generalism—dipping into different disciplines, interests, and ideas. I often worried this approach meant sacrificing depth for breadth, leaving me moving slowly in many directions rather than swiftly in one.

Documenting how an APIAPI A set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate with each other. APIs define the methods and data formats that applications can use to request and exchange information. works is easy. Documenting what you can do with it is the hard part, and it's the part that actually matters.

Every PM should have an angle - a specific area of depth that makes them genuinely useful. I think of these as the 5Ds:

• Design - Can shape user experience, run research, translate insights into interfaces
• Development - Understands technical constraints, can collaborate deeply with engineers, knows what's actually hard
• Delivery - Masters of getting things out the door, managing scope, unblocking teams
• Domain - Deep expertise in a specific vertical (fintech, health, logistics)
• Data - Can define metrics, run experiments, make decisions grounded in evidence

I care about how products feel to use, but “delight” has always felt slightly too decorative a word for it. The thing I’m after is more practical: design that makes a product work better.

I call it functional elegance.

You’re probably used to the ever-present idea of an MVP:

Create a product with the minimum set of features that are enough to satisfy early adopters and provide a basis for feedback and future development.