Brendan Lynch

Biography

My name is Brendan Lynch. I am from a small village in County Cork, Ireland. My educational background is in business and finance. I graduated with a degree in Business: Recreation and Leisure Management, and then went on to complete an honors degree in Accounting.

I have worked as a Technical Writer at ABN AMRO for almost 1 ½ years. I work in the API Strategy and Developer Experience team and my role is to curate, manage, and improve API documentation and processes. It has been a whirlwind experience where I have learned so much.

Prior to this job I worked as an English teacher in South Korea for 10 years. There, I taught students ranging from young children and teens, to college students and business professionals. Korea is also where I met, dated, and married my wife Youni.

I am an avid reader and enjoy all genres and categories of books. I also have a passion for traveling, where I can see and experience new places, meet new people, and enjoy the local foods on offer.

Talk description

This talk describes the development of ABN AMRO’s API handbook, the single-source of truth for the development and management of internal and external API products.

Our company is moving towards an API-First culture and mentality. Streamlining the development process is key to enabling this. In the beginning, API development knowledge was not documented or centralized in one location. Accurate information was not available for developer teams and they were not aware of what exactly the process entailed.

My colleague and I began by making agreements on how the overall process works, describing it in an intuitive way, and then by making it open and accessible company-wide. This involved setting up and hosting face-to-face meetings or MS Teams calls with specialists to find out what was required

This talk describes our approach to gathering content from experts, defining and refining processes, obtaining feedback from readers, and redesigning the content in a more user-centric format.