Reviewing Salad's API developer experience

I recently was hired by Salad to audit the developer experience of their platform. I dug deep into the developer documentation, assessing the onboarding process, testing API calls to see how they function, looking at the error responses, and gauging the overall experience. 

Salad has a really cool offering, and I encourage people to try it out. The platform offers a platform-as-a-service to deploy containerized cloud-based GPUs for training and running machine learning models. It also offers more SaaS-y options for calling pre-trained AI models to perform specific tasks, like audio transcription. You can configure some of this visually, but the entire platform is accessible via a RESTful HTTP API as well.

When I do these audits, I really try to get in the developer's shoes and take a "show me the code" mindset. I spent a few days getting comfortable and toying around with the platform. The project culminated in a 10-page audit and an hour-long consultation with the team. 

My biggest recommendation was to unify the developer experience, as learnability felt fragmented between the developer portal, individual cards for model recipes, tutorial pages, and the core API reference. I also noticed naming inconsistencies, errors, delays in running certain model jobs, a lack of SDKs, and other minor UI issues.

I loved the Salad API reference's playground, which is based on Mintlify. I also suggested ways to refine the sandbox experience with auto-population for default fields. Some other tips could aid developer experience on Salad, such as including a public OpenAPI file, a public changelog, and stories around developer use cases.

All in all, the platform has a lot of potential, and the team was super friendly and helpful. I look forward to following their journey!

I really enjoy doing these audits (check out the one I did for Authenticating.com), as it feels very fulfilling to help teams refine their product. Also, I can put all the best practices around API documentation and developer experience that we've been sharing on Nordic APIs for years to good use!