Mariotti: Stripe pioneered the now-standard three-column API documentation layout
Augusto Marietti · a16z Podcast | The API Economy -- The Why, What, and How · Jan 2, 2019 · at 16:37
Augusto Mariotti of Kong discusses how Stripe's documentation design set an industry-wide standard for structuring API resource descriptions, endpoints, and live code examples.
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“I think Stripe did a great job back in like five, six years ago on documentations because they were, I think, the first one to innovate in such a simple thing. But it looks simple, but actually very complex to make it easy to digest by having a three column structure. So you have the resource, then you have the endpoint, then you have example of the response. And so this three-column structure now became a mainstream. Back in 2011, it was not clear. All the docs were messy. That really brought a lot of innovation in the market because of how simple it was to read the docs.”
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