How API Evangelist Works

I’ve covered this topic several times before, but I figured I’d share again for folks who might have just become readers int he last year. Providing an overview of how API Evangelist works, to help eliminate confusion as you are navigating around my site, as well as to help you find what you are looking for. First, API Evangelist was started in the summer of 2010 as a research site to help me better understand what is going on in the world of APIs. In 2017, it is still a research site, but it has grown and expanded pretty dramatically into a network of websites, driven by a data and a content core.

The most import thing to remember is that all my sites run on Github, which is my workbench in the the API Evangelist workshop. apievangelist.com is the front door of the workshop, with each area of my research existing as its own Github repository, at its own subdomain with the apievangelist domain. An example of this can be found in my API design research, where you will find at design.apievangelist.com. As I do my work each day, I publish my research to each of my domains, in the form of YAML data for one of these areas:

  • Organizatons - Companies, organizations, institutions, programs, and government agencies doing anything interesting with APIs.
  • Individuals - The individual people at organizations, or independently doing anything interesting with APIs.
  • News - The interesting API related, or other news I curate and tag daily in my feed reader or as I browse the web.
  • Tools - The open source tooling I come across that I think is relevant to the API space in some way.
  • Building Blocks - The common building blocks I find across the organizations, and tooling I’m studying, showing the good and the bad of doing APIs.
  • Patents - The API related patents I harvest from the US Patent Office, showing how IP is impacting the world of APIs.

You can find the data for each of my research areas in the _ data folder for each repository. Which is then rendered as HTML for each subdomain using Liquid via each Jekyll CMS driven website. All of this is research. It isn’t meant to be perfect, or a comprehensive directory for others to use. If you find value in it–great!! However, it is just my research laying on my workbench. It will change, evolve, and be remixed and reworked as I see fit, to support my view of the API sector. You are always welcome to learn from this research, or even fork and reuse it in your own work. You are also welcome to submit pull requests to add or update content that you come across about your organization or open source tool.

The thing to remember about API Evangelist is it exist primarily for me. It is about me learning. I take what I learn and publish as blog posts to API Evangelist. This is how I work through what I’m discovering as part of my research each day, and use as a vehicle to move my understanding of APIs forward. This is where it starts getting real. After seven years of doing this I am reaching 4K to 7K page views per day, and clearly other folks find value in reading, and sifting through my research. Because of this I have four partners, 3Scale, Restlet, Runscope, and Tyk who pay me money to have their logo on the home page, in the navigation, and via a footer toolbar. Runscope also pays me to place a re-marketing tag on my site so they can show advertising to my users on other websites, and Facebook. This is how I pay my rent, an how I eat each month.

Beyond this base, I take my research and create API Evangelist industry guides. API Definitions, and API Design are the two most recent editions. I’m currently working on one for data, database, as well as deployment, and management. These guides are sometimes underwritten by my partners, but mostly they are just the end result of my API research. I also spend time and energy taking what I know and craft API strategy and white papers for clients, and occasionally I actually create APIs for people–mostly in the realm of human services, or other social good efforts. I’m not really interested in building APIs for startups, or in service of the Silicon Valley machine. Even tough I enjoy watching, studying, and learning from this world, because there are endless lessons regarding how we can use technology in this community, as well as how we should not be using technology.

That is a pretty basic walk through of API Evangelist works. It is important to remember I am doing this research for myself. To learn, and to make a living. API Evangelist is a production, a persona I created to help me wade through the technology, business, and politics of APIs. It reflects who I am, but honestly is increasingly more bullshit than it is reality, kind of like the API space. I hope you enjoy this work. I enjoy hearing from my readers, and hearing how my research impacts your world. It keeps me learning each day, and from ever having to go get a real job. It is always a work in progress and never done. Which I know frustrates some, but I find endlessly interesting, and is something that reflects the API journey, something you have to get used to if you are going to be successful doing APIs in this crazy world.