My API Design Research Distilled Down As Single PDF Guide

When API Evangelist began five years ago it was a single research into the business of APIs, which ultimately became a research project which I called API management. Over the last four years, I have spliced off other areas of research including the elements of my core research into API design, deployment, management, integration, evangelism, and monetization

My goal with each research project, is to evolve my understanding of each area of the API space by identifying the key companies and organizations involved, the open tooling being developed and put to work, and some of the common building blocks that make up each area. For each of my research projects, you can visit its Github repository to get regular updates, but I find many people seem to prefer browsing a single, portable paper of my research.

Each year I usually published a PDF version of each research project, something I have always intended to update regularly. However it seems, this is usually is an annual thing that I find time for in the summer. To helpl change this, I've evolved my own tooling for publishing for what I considers guides to my research areas, allowing me to more easily publish the information and content I regularly curate about the space. 

I just finished v1 of my paper API, which allows me to aggregate pages, organizations, building blocks, tools, and news that I curate, into field guides for my research. Using this new API, i intend to update each of my core research areas each month, getting more disciplined about distilling my research down to a single, coherent story. 

Here is a copy of my API design research as a single PDF guide, you can also find it on the main navigation for my API design research. Now that I have my paper API stabilized, I will going through API deployment, and management, publishing a research guide for each. This process couldn't have come at a better time, as I'm carving out a couple of new research areas for API performance, testing, and monitoring, and I would like to be able to quickly publish guides for each of those areas as well.