I am determined to continue taking my career to the next level. I’ve done well doing API Evangelist over the years, but I feel like I’ve gone as far as I can all by my lonesome. To level things up I feel I need more than just my words. I need some meaningful tooling, and collaboration with people who are building interesting and meaningful things with APIs to get to the place I envision in my minds eye. There are just a handful of startups out there who have both captured my API imagination, are making a meaningful impact on the API sector, and share my ethical view of the API sector, and one of them is Postman. I’ve supported Postman since they emerged on the scene, and as of today, I am joining their team as their Chief Evangelist.
Moving forward I will keep telling stories here on the blog, and doing what I do as the API Evangelist, but I will be actively supporting the Postman team when it comes to developer relations, marketing, product, and business development. I will be merging my visions of the API lifecycle with Postman's vision of how their API Development Environment (ADE) helps developers realize many of the stops along the API lifecycle that I talk about, while also working with enterprise groups, startups, and government agencies to development meaningful API blueprints that can help us all on our API journey. This will be just one of many tasks on my plate as I get my bearings within the Postman community, get to know the team, and become more acquainted with the product roadmap.
After a six month break, I will be now showing up at more events, cranking up my storytelling on API Evangelist and Postman blogs, and working to craft other meaningful stories in a variety of formats, including guides, blueprints, videos, and other variations—helping us all better understand the API lifecycle. I am really eager to have a meaningful tool that is not just used by developers, but actually beloved by developers to help guide my API lifecycle research. I feel like I’ve been working on an API PHD for the last 9 years, have finished my dissertation, and now I’m ready to actually begin applying what I know in the real world. Moving from the theoretical to more of the hands on reality of doing APIs across startups, enterprise, and government agencies.
While much of my storytelling will be rooted in what Postman does, Abhinav and team understand the importance of what I do, and the meaningful impact my work has on the API sector. Meaning that my storytelling will always be applicable to API providers and consumers who are not Postman customers, but since Postman is a free solution, there will be a significant opportunity for people to be putting Postman to work while also learning about providing and consuming APIs. If you have followed my work over the last nine years you will know that I don’t get on board with tooling and services that I don’t believe in, and I am definitely a user and believer in Postman, as well as the team behind it. I am super excited to be part of the team, and to be learning from how the Postman team views the API sector--adding to my existing knowledge and expertise.
It will take me a few weeks to find my footing, but I’m looking to better understand how people are using Postman. If you are using postman within your organization I’d like to hear from you. Feel free to email me at [email protected] or [email protected] and share any thoughts you have. I’m looking for anything I can use within stories that I tell on the blog, all the way up to full blown blueprints detailing the entire API lifecycle(s) that exist across your organization. I’m also really looking for insight into what is holding developers back from using Postman beyond just being an API client, and taking advantage of the mocking, testing, documentation, scripting, and other more advanced features. I participated in an all-day Postman workshop yesterday and learned a ton of new things about variables, environments, scripting, and more, revealing how little of the functionality I have been actually putting to work in my API work.
This post is coming together as I sit at PostCon in San Francisco. I’m getting ready to help close things up with a few words about all the stories I’ve heard today. I am rooting what I say in collaboration, because this was something I heard over and over today about Postman. It isn’t just for making requests to APIs, it is for collaborating with your team, partners, and API consumers when it comes to the value your API resources bring to the table. This human centered capability is why I am here. I am a believer in the technical capabilities of Postman, but this human enablement is what matters to me when it comes to providing and consuming APIs. I am very much looking forward to the next phase of my API journey, and thank you to Abhinav, Ankit, Abhijit, and team for bringing me on, and making all of this possible.
