# Gamification a secret weapon when developing APIs
source: https://developer.mastercard.com/blog/developer-first/index.md

Authors: Lisa Bongiovi. It should come as no surprise that developers have a strong influence over what technology their organization adopts. In a recent Stackoverflow report, 66% of professional developers are influencing their organization's purchases of new technologies (up from 56% in 2020). This increase in influence is re-enforcing the imperative to make our APIs self-service and easy to use. How do we ensure that our APIs are designed and published with developers front and center? There are two focus areas that help drive enhancements on the developer experience: our internal API Standards and governance program, and our approach to dogfooding. API Standards and Governance Our web APIs must perform every bit as well as our core payments network, so we have a dedicated API governance program that we internally refer to as "API Gold Standards". It goes beyond defining the standard for the API contract itself and provides standards and guidance for technical and product documentation, sandbox quality, provision of reference applications, sample code, helper libraries etc. We've found a great way to encourage adherence to these standards - we gamify them. We developed a detailed scorecard with weighted scores for technical documentation and tooling, product content, technical performance, as well as sales and marketing documentation. We assess every API on Mastercard Developers regularly and score them out of 100. On a bi-monthly basis we publish these scores internally, highlight score changes and call out key improvements. This has fostered some friendly competition between internal API teams. Having a developer-first focus doesn't just apply to how we publish our APIs, it permeates everything we do. To make the lives of the developers on the API teams a little easier, the API Standards team have created a Linter that analyzes the Open API spec for every API and generates a detailed report along with recommended remediations. They took it a step further and have integrated it into the IDE so developers can see if they are about to fall foul of any standard in their code. Dogfooding Our engineers walk in the shoes of our customers, by using our APIs as you would, to understand the pain points and challenges when building products so we can improve them. They go through the entire developer journey on Mastercard Developers from onboarding, integration with a sandbox and test environment, working with support and finally promotion to production. As a B2B company with system-to-system APIs operating within complex commercial eco-systems, serving a broad range of use cases, dogfooding can be a challenging endeavor - even for the most driven API owners. To overcome some of those challenges, we create simulators that represent typical key dependent entities (such as banks, merchants, partner service providers etc.). These are designed to be re-used and have expanded to become a virtual eco-system mimicking various real-world scenarios. After years of dogfooding many APIs, these simulators have become quite sophisticated; for example, in our simulated platform, the bank can issue a card, which gets tokenized and passed to a wallet residing on a merchant checkout, leveraging a payment provider that processes the payment using fraud services and applying loyalty benefits. The goal of the dogfooding program is to understand and optimize the customer journey, which includes saving developer time, so you spend less time on plumbing in an API and are free to focus on delivering value for your business. Mastercard Developers Our focus on the developer experience has resulted in a platform and APIs that are designed to meet the needs of developers throughout their onboarding and integration journey: rich documentation, tutorials, quick start guides, and technical and product support. We also leverage open-source libraries to wrap OAuth and encryption features and use the industry standard Open API specification. The Open API specification and tooling frees us up from having to craft client SDKs as they grant developers the flexibility to roll out their own client libraries in their preferred language. Mastercard Developers gets you up and running quickly with auto-provisioned sandboxes, Postman Collections, reference and demo applications and sample code. We've also developed an intuitive developer dashboard that facilitates easy API and encryption key management. While our key focus is helping developers cut through the boiler plate code of integrating with an API, we're in the process of implementing some handy UI widgets and design guides to help guide you through implementing real world use cases. These tools are currently available on a limited number of APIs (e.g. Digital Debit Mastercard) but we'll be adding more throughout the year. If you are looking for an API solution related to open finance, security, identity, data analytics, payments across multiple rails in any form factor, you need to check out the Mastercard suite of API products.