The Importance Of API Stories

I am an API storyteller before am an API architect, designer, or evangelist. My number one job is to tell stories about the API space. I make sure there is always (almost) 3-5 stories a day published to API Evangelist about what I’m seeing as I conduct my research on the sector, and thoughts I’m having while consulting and working on API projects. I’ve been telling stories like this for seven years, which has proven to me how much stories matter in the world of technology, and the worlds that it is impacting–which is pretty much everything right now.

Occasionally I get folks who like to criticize what I do, making sure I know that stories don’t matter. That nobody in the enterprise or startups care about stories. Results are what matter. Ohhhhh reeeaaaly. ;-) I hate to tell you, it is all stories. VC investment in startups is all about the story. The markets all operate on stories. Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Medium. TechCrunch. It is all stories. The stories we tell ourselves. The stories we tell each other. The stories we believe. The stories we refuse to believe. It is all stories. Stories are important to everything.

The mythical story about Jeff Bezos’s mandate that all employees needed to use APIs internally is still 2-3% of my monthly traffic, down from 5-8% for the last couple of years, and it was written in 2012 (five years ago). I’ve seen this story on the home page of the GSA internal portal, and framed hanging on the wall in a bank in Amsterdam. Stories are important. Stories are still important when they aren’t true, or partially true, like the Amazon mythical tale is(n’t). Stories are how we make sense of all this abstract stuff, and turn it into relatable concepts that we can use within the constructs of our own worlds. Stories are how the cloud became a thing. Stories are why microservices and Devops is becoming a thing. Stories are how GraphQL wants to be a thing.

For me, most importantly, telling stories is how I make sense of the world. If I can’t communicate something to you here on API Evangelist, it isn’t filed away in my mental filing cabinet. Telling stories is how I have made sense of the API space. If I can’t articulate a coherent story around API related technology, and it just doesn’t make sense to me, it probably won’t stick around in my storytelling, research, and consulting strategy. Stories are everything to me. If they aren’t to you, it’s probably because you are more on the receiving end of stories, and not really influencing those around you in your community, and workplace. Stories are important. Whether you want to admit it or not.