I am working to craft complete Swagger definitions for the 1000 companies in my API Stack, and what better place to start than with the APIs that I actually use on a daily basis. I am working hard to make sure all the APIs for my own master API stack are as complete as possible, but taking inventory of the public APIs that I depend on also makes a lot of sense.
I’ve long kept a list of APIs that I use, for IT purposes, but I don’t have a complete profile of all of these services. As with any vendo, I should have a complete profile of the APIs I depend on, with relevant support channels, documentation, code samples, monitors, and some of the other essentials I track on for other APIs in the space.
This is all a work in progress, that is published as its own Github Pages hosted API Evangelist research project, but here are the 30+ APIs I have on my list:
3Scale Account Management
3Scale Analytics
3Scale Billing
3scale Service Management
AlchemyAPI Author Extraction API
AlchemyAPI Keyword and Term Extraction
AlchemyAPI Text Extraction API
Amazon EC2
Amazon Relational Database Service
Amazon Route 53
Amazon S3
AngelList Startup API
API Science
bitly Data API Search
CrunchBase
Disqus
Dropbox Core API
Dropbox Datastore API
Dropbox for Business API
Dwolla
EasyCron
Eventbrite
Flickr
FullContact Name API
FullContact Location Normalization API
GitHub
Calendar API
Compute Engine API
Gmail API
Google Container Engine API
Google Spreadsheets
Tag Manager API
URL Shortener API
Heroku
Instagram API
Meetup API
The Noun Project Icon API
OpenCorporates
PayPal
Paypal Payments
Pinboard API
Reddit API
Runscope
Slack API
SoundCloud
Stack Exchange API
Twitter API
As I am doing with the rest of the APIs in my stack, I am profiling each of these company’s API operations, down to the underlying data model. My goal is to establish a complete profile of the operations using APIs.json, as well as each endpoint, using Swagger.
Similar to my own internal, master stack of APIs, I will break each API down into the smallest possible unit of value, and generate Postman Collections, link to SDKs.io SDKs, API Science monitors, and other essentials of API integration. At the very least, I now have a coherent list of APIs I depend on for my business, something that in my opinion, every company should have in 2015.
