David J. PhillipsĀ @davjĀ / 2:30 PM PST ā¢ February 10, 2023
FernĀ launched on Y Combinatorās āLaunch YCā today š
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Fern is an open source format for defining REST APIs, it generates useful artifacts for your API, like SDKs, docs, and server code. It's automation for your API. Define your API once and click generate.
The company is founded by Danny Sheridan, Deep Singhvi, and Zach Kirsch. The team consists of former Palantir and AWS engineers.
HOW IT WORKS
FernĀ productizes schema-first API design. You define the schema of your API (or give them OpenAPI spec) and Fern generates:
- SDKsĀ in popular programming languages. Fern SDKs feel handwritten. They can be used externally for customers or internally for your frontend/microservices.
- API docsĀ that sync to your provider of choice.
- Postman CollectionĀ complete with examples of successful and unsuccessful requests
- Server-side validationĀ to make sure that you serve the API you promised.
Fern also registers all versions of your API in a registry ā no need to ping a coworker over Slack to understand how to consume an API.
The Fern team has spent a lot of time doing repetitive, tedious tasks when writing APIs. They would write the types and networking on the backend and then do it all again in TypeScript on the frontend. Theyād do it again when writing client libraries and a fourth time when updating their documentation and Postman collection.
Writing the same code repeatedly and keeping it all in sync is time-consuming, error-prone, and work no engineering team wants to do.
Fern lets engineering teams build APIs twice as fast. Define your API and generate server code, SDKs, documentation, and a Postman collection.
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HOW TO LEARN MORE
Visit www.buildwithfern.com to book a demo. Be sure toāļø them onĀ GitHub! Check out theirĀ blogĀ about how Candid Health uses Fern.