OpenAPI has become one of our preferred approaches for designing and documenting REST APIs across many of our projects. This specification-first methodology allows us to define API contracts before implementation, enabling parallel development between frontend and backend teams while ensuring consistency and clarity. We've found that OpenAPI's machine-readable format significantly reduces integration friction and accelerates our development cycles when working with REST-based architectures. The specification serves as both documentation and a single source of truth, eliminating the common disconnect between what APIs actually do and what developers think they do.
Our adoption of OpenAPI has enhanced how we approach API governance and developer experience in our REST API projects. Tools like Swagger UI provide interactive documentation that developers can explore and test directly in the browser, while OpenAPI Generator enables us to automatically create client SDKs and server stubs in multiple programming languages from our specifications. This ecosystem of tools — including validation frameworks and mock servers—has proven invaluable for testing strategies and continuous integration. We recommend this approach for teams building well-documented REST APIs that can evolve gracefully over time.