I keep an eye on things that are trending daily and weekly on Github because it is a great way to discover new companies and individuals doing interesting things with APIs. While looking at this earlier this week I came across the open guide to Amazon Web Services, a pretty robust, and well organized getting started guide to everything AWS.
Here is their description of this resource out of the leading cloud computing platform:
A lot of information on AWS is already written. Most people learn AWS by reading a blog or a “getting started guide” and referring to the standard AWS references. Nonetheless, trustworthy and practical information and recommendations aren’t easy to come by. AWS’s own documentation is a great but sprawling resource few have time to read fully, and it doesn’t include anything but official facts, so omits experiences of engineers. The information in blogs or Stack Overflow is also not consistently up to date.
This guide is by and for engineers who use AWS. It aims to be a useful, living reference that consolidates links, tips, gotchas, and best practices. It arose from discussion and editing over beers by several engineers who have used AWS extensively.
I find it interesting when API providers invest in authoritative solutions like this, acknowledging the scattered and often out of date nature of blogs, QA sites, forums, and the wealth of other self-service resources available for APIs. Amazon is getting seriously organized with their approach to provider resources for developers--they have been doing this a while, and know where the pain points are.
Amazon's organized approach, the breaking down by service, and the usage of Github are all interesting things I think are worth noting as part of my research. AWS is a tough API pioneer to showcase because they have way more resources than the average API provider, but as one of the early leaders in the API space they possess some serious wisdom and practices that are worth emulating. I'll keep going through their open guide, and see what other patterns I can extract and showcase so that my readers can consider.
