The Annotated Code Walk-Throughs and Tutorials Over At Twilio

I am always trying to identify the common building blocks employed by leading API providers, and Twilio is one of the usual suspects I showcase. This time it is focusing their annotated code walk-throughs and tutorials, which provides a pretty good model that other API providers can follow when planning their own tutorials.

Twilio offers up a tutorial for almost every API endpoint they offer. Some of the more popular tutorials have versions for almost every programming language, while some of the lesser traveled ones only have a single version. Once you click in to each tutorial, it delivers as the title implies, an annotated walk through, showing you how to get up and running, making the API call, in the language of choice.

Each tutorials provides you a direct link to the code libaries, available on Twilio's Github account. It can get pretty busy in the walk-through section for Twilio, but the value is clear. I could envision a more portable, embeddable, and machine readable tool, that would help API providers do this as well as Twilio, but maybe in a more cleaner, plug and play way.

I've had tutorials as a common API management building block for some time, maybe I'll take Twilio's model and expand on it, and provide a more detailed blueprint that API providers can follow when planning their own approach. Maybe someone could also turn it into a simple service, or open source solution that the API space could put to use.