It is loud down here amongst the APIs. It is hard to hear your own voice over the noise, and after you have many folks tell you that you can’t speak, or heavily edit you when you do speak, you begin to forget what you sounded like back when you had your voice. Your leadership, your coworkers, your partners, your investors, and the industry are all telling you what you should and what you shouldn’t be talking about. It is easy to be quiet, do what you are told, and get lost among the nutrient-free hum of the API economy, eventually forgetting what your voice ever sounded like.
Not having a voice was the number one reason why I left Bloomberg and Postman. Both spaces have their own approach to dictating what you can and cannot say, for reasons that make and do not make sense. If you meet me in person, and spend any amount of time with me, you’ll find that I am mostly quiet. I do not talk a lot. However, when it comes to APIs, and the impact API-driven technology is having on our lives, I have a lot to say. I HAVE TO share the story of what I am seeing each day, otherwise it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist because someone reads my writing, it exists because I’ve written it down in a way that makes sense to me, and maybe (hopefully) to a handful of other people. What exists only matters if I use my voice to tell a story about it and why it matters to us humans.
Take a moment to look around you and take stock of what you’ve read or listened to lately that really got your mind going about some idea related to APIs and technology, or found a way to convince you to be excited about your work recently. There isn’t much. Do you feel the lack of nutrients that exists in the API space at this moment? Don’t get me wrong, there are some folks doing good work, and beating the drum, but the drum circle is faint and way in the back corners of the tech sector parking lot—-when our work is powering everything. I want to understand how this happens to us. I want to make sense of why we reduce everything to a transaction, even at the high cost of losing our voice, or worse, losing our way amidst the deafening hum of digital technology in our lives.
I need my voice to make sense of the technology, business, policies, and people involved with APIs. I am hyper aware of how the API space controls and shapes my voice. The number one reason I had a voice from 2013 through 2016, the peak of API Evangelist, was due to the support of a single individual-—Steve Willmott (formerly of 3scale & Redhat, and I don’t know what he does now, something with money and term sheets blah blah blah). He gave me the space to continue polishing my voice and write about whatever I wanted. I’ve tried unsuccessfully to maintain that voice over the last five years, but intend to get back to my roots by being my own benefactor this round, taking some of the money I’ve earned and putting it back into storytelling across the space. I will pay myself to use my voice to make sense of things in the API space, and even sell access to that voice to help you make sense of things in your API space.
When I look out across the API space it is easy for me to remember that everything is made of stories. REST, API Management, GraphQL, Event-Driven, and every other concept we think just exist, only exists because we’ve told stories. Some of these stories are crafted because people are looking to make sense of things, but most are crafted to tell you how to make sense of things so that you’ll purchase a product, service, or use a specific tool or pattern. When you work down in the technical weeds it is easy to forget that the technology doesn’t matter and it is the stories that shape our world-—we love our technology whispering in our ears. When you work on the business side of things, you live and breathe storytelling, but it is also esy to lose your way, as many have with AI right now. It will get harder to use your voice to make sense of things in this very noisy moment, which is why it is so important that we don’t forget how to use our voice each day.
P.S. As I wrote this the fucking Roomba woke up and is circling the living room terrorizing me and my dog and may have had an impact on the tone of my story.
