![]() If more of these tools had APIs, I would automate more and integrate them more deeply into our workflows. And the undocumented API problem is prevalent among newer SaaS tools, and it makes sense: APIs are hard to build, document, and maintain. It took me a couple days of hacking to get a reasonable solution working the first time. I recently read a blog post where the author ran a proxy and executed a man-in-the-middle attack in order to build a calendar widget for one of his favorite websites. You could set up a headless browser to automate clicks or turn to that ol’ standby Grease Monkey script for watching your browser traffic. The good news is that it’s still possible to use an undocumented API. The catch? Notion doesn’t have a publicly documented API. ![]() All we needed was to figure out how to automate Notion. Given how many meetings we have a week, I figured we could get several hours back a week if we could get computers to automate creating the Notion page for us. Most of our team meetings began with “Did someone create a Notion page?” or “Where is the page from last week’s meeting?” The same thing would happen during customer meetings. For instance, we keep team meeting information in Notion. But the problems started when we needed to add new information to Notion. When I joined Akita, I realized that Notion was what we needed to organize information across the team. How do I manage to keep up? That’s easy: AUTOMATE ALL THE THINGS!!! I also require some sleep, food, and the occasional trip outside. Customer feedback, blog posts like this one, product usage, and engineering metrics are just a few of the things I need to track. Now for how I came to autogenerate an API spec for Notion.Īs the product manager at a small startup, I spend a lot of time making sure that the right information gets to the right place. We’ve been working hard to make this technology easily accessible to developers, no code changes required, in just minutes. Core to Akita’s approach is diffing API specs and contracts learned across different environments. Akita watches API traffic to automatically generate API specs and infer implicit API contracts. These observations led me to join Akita about a year ago.Īt Akita, we’ve been working to give structure to the interaction graph of APIs, for instance to detect breaking changes in web apps. For instance, the rise of internal and external APIs make it much more difficult to prevent breaking changes. While I was making APIs easier to use at Twilio, I also saw how APIs made software development harder. I joined Akita after eight years at Twilio, where I helped define products like Twilio Marketplace and Twilio Channels. To anyone who wants to learn an undocumented API–or document your own API so people don’t have to do this-you may be interested in checking out our private beta! □ First, some background (See what we learned on SwaggerHub here!) How to use Akita to automatically learn APIs, including the Notion API. ![]() How this led my team at Akita to build a new feature to automatically learn undocumented APIs.How I tried to automate against the Notion the hard way.After my experience trying to learn the undocumented Notion API, we decided to automate the process of learning web APIs so that nobody would have to suffer like this again. This blog post is about a new feature that my team and I built after I spent a painful couple of days figuring out how to script against Notion. This also means there are a lot of SaaS APIs out there that could make users’ lives easier, but that haven’t been documented. This means the company responsible for the API has made a conscious choice to expose the API-and they’ve allocated the resources to creating and maintaining documentation. Not only do APIs give developers instant access to powerful functionality, but their programmability also makes it easy for developers to integrate disparate pieces of functionality.īut today, this only applies to documented APIs. ![]() Software is eating the world and APIs are at the forefront.
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