#2 Product of the DaySeptember 26, 2017
Discussion
Would you recommend this product?
11 Reviews
Maker
Hey! At ReadMe, we believe a few things about APIs:
1/ 📘 The best APIs are very closely integrated with the documentation
2/ 💡 APIs should be really simple
3/ ⚒ APIs don't need to be consumed via code... Slack, Google Sheets, IFTTT, etc
So, we turn this into a product! Our goal with ReadMe Build was to make it as simple as humanly possible to create, deploy and share APIs.
Creating an API is as easy as:
$ npm install api -g
$ api init
$ api deploy
And consuming them is even easier! Here's an (admittedly contrived) example:
https://readme.build/service/math
Let us know what you think!
Upvote (15)Share
@gkoberger Congrats. Great idea. It all also feels very polished. How long have you been working on this? Are there any production APIs launched?
@gkoberger Is this deploying the API to Lambda?
Maker
@gkoberger awesome. I think it would be helpful if there were a few more examples in the docs. Such as - connecting to a database / another service (I'm guessing is the same as using lambda).
Other feedback: Deploying through Readme feels "risky" to me. Seems too black box Vs deploying straight to lamba and "owning" it. I do think having Readme be able to auto document existing Lambda functions would be really interesting though.
Maker
@mscccc good point on more examples... coming soon!
As for deploying... For people who want control, deploying straight to Lambda is still an option! But for most people, I think they want it to "just work." Kind of like Heroku: you give up control, sure, but in return everything is simple and works well and you just have to worry about writing the code.
For example, here's some features of Build:
* Versioning is done automatically. If a customer uses v1.0.0, and v1.0.1 is released, they customer stays on v1.0.0 (meaning no breaking changes) until it's deprecated.
* Extensive logging, including the ability to attach logs to Issues (so the creator can see what's wrong)
* Rate limiting, API keys, and stuff like that are taken care of
* Consuming is really easy and standardized. We bought "api" package/gem/etc in most languages, so there's no need to worry about URLs. Your APIs just work.
There's a ton more, but those are an overview of some of the cool features you get from Build that wouldn't be possible (without extensive work) if you were deploying directly to Lambda.
We don't see ourselves as a host, but rather a documentation/UI company. If you try consuming an API (for example, https://www.readme.build/service...), you'll see nice of an experience it is!
this is so dope. and your team rocks
great enhancement @gkoberger!! Happy to be customers of Readme @ WorkRamp and also when we were at Box!
