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Owlet Weekly Update (Week of July 13th)

July 14th, 2020

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Welcome to another update!
We have exciting news to share.
This week, we updated the ReadMe API
To include poems with every err'!

Alas, I'm not nearly as good at writing poems as Greg (our CEO) is — who literally wrote over 30 unique poems for each and every error code that is returned from the ReadMe HTTP API! 🖋️

In other non-poetry-related (but nevertheless exciting) news, we also shipped some exciting updates to our icons, made a ton of usability improvements to our GitHub integration, and lots more. More information below! :owlbert-reading:

✨ New & Improved

  • As mentioned above, we made some huge improvements to our API errors. Now, when you receive an error from the ReadMe HTTP API, the response object will include links to API logs, better descriptions of the error, and of course... a poem! 🖋️ Try sending the following cURL request in your terminal and observe the response:

    curl --location --request GET 'https://dash.readme.com/api/v1' \
    --header 'Authorization: Basic T3dsZXQgV2Vla2x5IFVwZGF0ZTo='

  • This hopefully won't be nearly as controversial as the great Slack logo change of January 2019 (we ALL had opinions on that), but we gave some of our icons a fresh redesign! Our design team wanted to create a set of icons that are simpler, more consistent, and that hopefully feel more relevant to the use case (it's an API Reference section, not an audio mixer!) — check out the changes below and let us know what you think. 🎨

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  • If you were following our Changelog this past Halloween, you'll recall that we shipped a GitHub integration in large part because we wanted to share this image. While I don't have any culturally relevant images to share this time around (and honestly if I did, they'd be quite bleak), I'm excited to announce some big improvements to our GitHub Action: A beautiful new onboarding flow in the dashboard and a vastly simplified workflow configuration file! Check out our updated article in the docs for more info. 🎃
  • We're so close to the end of this gradual rollout of our new search feature y'all... So close! We just did an additional rollout of these search improvements to even more projects today. If you haven't already, please let us know what you think at [email protected]! 🔍

🛠 Fixes & Updates

  • With the announcement of ReadMe Free, we've seen a lot of new interest — which has been very exciting! However, there was a bug where if you selected the Free plan, it was impossible to switch back to your trial. We also added some in-product clarification about what features are available during the trial versus in the Free plan. You can also check out our pricing page for information on this. Apologies for any confusion, folks! Happy to report that these fixes and clarifications are now live. ⏪
  • In addition to better error messages, we made our API a bit smarter with respect to Basic Authentication. While we still recommend using best practices for Basic Auth, we'll do our best to recognize other ways you send us your credentials in the Authorization header. 🔐
  • For those of you that were agonizing over our glaring lack of icon support for HEAD and TRACE requests in the API Explorer — rejoice! We've just added them. 🎨
  • Most ReadMe project administrators are only members of one or two projects — but for you power users out there, we made some minor readability improvements to the dashboard project list view. 👀
  • Minor rendering improvements related to our newly redesigned project navigation bar. 🧭
  • A couple of tiny design fixes to our new search feature. 🔍
  • And last but definitely not least, some big behind-the-scenes improvements to our release process (which makes my job so much easier — thank you Rafe)! 🚀

Thank you for reading another weekly post,
Thank you for bearing with me as I do the most,
And thank you for being a part of the ReadMe community—
Check out this Code Switch episode on qualified immunity.

—Kanad and the ReadMe Team :owlbert:

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What is the Owlet Weekly Update?

Thanks for tuning in to another edition of our Owlet Weekly Update — an owlet-sized update (posted every Tuesday to the ReadMe Changelog) where we provide an overview of product updates that went out as part of our new Tuesday release cycle. As we refine our format and process for providing these updates, we'd love to hear what you think at [email protected]!