Product

Mailgun Hack Day: Making our API documentation smarter

Each month our team has the opportunity to hack on whatever it is we want to hack on. A fun way to learn something new, collaborate with different team members or just tidy up something that has been bugging us.

PUBLISHED ON

PUBLISHED ON

Each month our team has the opportunity to hack on whatever it is we want to hack on. A fun way to learn something new, collaborate with different team members or just tidy up something that has been bugging us.

For January’s hack day, a few of us (Anton, Jesse and myself) set out to make some improvements to our API Docs.

The problem

Our API is well documented and has a good range of code samples for all the major programming languages. However, there are a couple of things we noticed about the workflow.

To try an API request, a developer would typically:

  1. Copy a code sample to a text editor

  2. Edit some parameters (e.g. sender, recipient, body text)

  3. Go to their Mailgun Control Panel to copy their API key

  4. Go back to the code editor and paste the key

  5. Copy that sample to their command line and execute

For quickly exploring a new service or testing out a new endpoint, this seems like a couple of steps too many.

The solution

Part 1: Your Mailgun settings injected into code samples

Now the code samples we show you are a bit smarter. If you’re logged in to Mailgun, we will inject your API key and some smart defaults for you.

Therefore it’s just a matter of copy/pasting the code samples into your command line, executing, and they should work off the bat.

A GIF showing the API key

Part 2: Code samples are editable in the browser

We’ve also made the code samples editable. Using Ace editor, clicking on any code sample will turn it into a small in-browser text editor that you can make changes to.

An editable code sample provided by Mailgun

Conclusion

API docs are instrumental to the user experience of a developer service. With the above changes shipped to production, we hope that trying out our API should be a lot easier for new developers exploring our service and existing developers that want to test or troubleshoot different API endpoints.

Check out the improvements to the Mailgun developer docs.

Sign Up

It's easy to get started. And it's free.

See what you can accomplish with the world’s best email delivery platform.

Related readings

Help! My email account has been hacked. What should I do?

“Dear friends and family, if you’ve gotten any suspicious-looking messages from me recently, please don’t open them!” That’s probably the message you’d send to your...

Read more

Email validation – Why is it vital for your inbox?

We all have those moments when we get nervous and need to double-check ourselves. Did we fill in the right answer bubbles on a test? Did we type in the right password when...

Read more

SMTP v. API: Their differences and how to use them

You’re tasked with integrating email into the app you’re building or the customer relationship management (CRM) tool your business uses. You have two choices: SMTP or...

Read more

Popular posts

Mailgun iconSee what you can accomplish with the world's best email delivery platform. It's easy to get started.Let's get sending
CTA icon Mailgun Icon