In the last 5 years, we’ve watched the world's fastest growing engineering teams ditch development monoliths in favor of service-oriented architectures that speed time to market. And as microservices multiplied—making it harder to track ownership and quality—Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) emerged to help. But while the prospect of a single portal for developer productivity sounds enticing, veteran leaders know the perception of “one more tool” can make org-wide adoption challenging.

On September 13, 2023, Sentry hosted SF Python for a developer meetup in San Francisco. In this talk, Josh Ferge, Senior Software Engineer at Sentry, shared his experiences and insights on Sentry's journey of API documentation for their Django application. He talked about the various things they’ve tried, including: Schema / Example generation using dynamic tests; Writing OpenAPI JSON manually; Django Rest Framework & autodoc tooling around it; Problems with DRF serializers & performance, leading to Sentry custom implementation of schema generation using Python typing.