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Stories about the technology, business, policies, and people of APIs.
I created two Twitter API capabilities the other day to help someone pull a list of their Twitter favorites using the Twitter API. They said they wanted bookmarks and I assumed they used favorites ...
I am busy crafting new API capabilities from my laundry list of requests I have from folks. When I get an email or come across a Tweet with someone asking how they do something on Twitter I will ad...
Many folks don’t quite get my work and writing style. They are confused by the erratic flow of stories being published to API Evangelist, the incomplete nature of some of my research sites, and oth...
I was profiling the Atlassian APIs, considering what is possible with JIRA, Confluence, and Bitbucket. Three services that are baked into many enterprise organizations I’ve worked with over the yea...
This is an API first project for mapping out the mushroom industry. I have always had a passion for mushrooms, but as I get older I am looking at investing in more side projects that aren’t always ...
I am working my way through 2K+ API providers, refreshing my view of the API landscape, and the data I use to tune into the API economy. As I refresh the profile of each API provider, one of the ma...
As part of my ongoing API discovery and observability research, I am interested in better defining where the common places are within the enterprise that we find API signals. Those log files and ot...
I was talking with the Optic folks this morning about API definitions when they asked me for my opinions on what the difference between OpenAPI and Postman were. A question that isn’t easy to answe...
I was being asked for more information about how I profile APIs, and deal with the many differences I come across. It isn’t easy navigating the differences between different APIs, and come out with...
Because I have so many smart folks in my Twitter timeline I want to put out some of the seeds for stories I am working on for 2020. I want your help determining what has set the stage for the world...
I look through a lot of API developer portals and when I come across interesting layouts I like to pause and highlight them showing to other API providers what is possible, while turning API Evange...
I was recently looking to building a prototype integration between Salesforce and Workday, where I find myself needing to on-board with the Salesforce REST API for probably the 50+ time in my caree...
I was helping out someone trying to download air quality data in Australia today, and while I was playing around the Victoria Australia government AirWatch data API I thought I’d go ahead and add t...
I was creating a Postman collection for the 23andMe API. The 23andMe API is still available, despite the company pulling back somewhat when it comes to accessing the DNA and genetics API. You can s...
I am working on a Postman collection that deploys an API to AWS. I’m pulling the OpenAPI from Postman using the Postman API API (mind blown), and then publishing the API to AWS as an API using the ...
API observability is something I have written about for a while now after learning about it from Stripe. It is a phrase that has grown popular in API testing, monitoring, and performance circles. B...
I’ve been in numerous discussions with defenders of the Instructure Canvas platform after posting the Instructure LMS data points. These folks are blindly and passionately defending Instructure as ...
I encounter regular waves of API providers who are discouraged with the traffic to their API portal as well as the number of developers who are actually building something on top of their API. Many...
One of the things that became very clear during my conversations with folks at AWS re:Invent last week is that Postman’s revenue model is in alignment with what is needed within the enterprise. To ...
As I work on creating more useful Postman collections I am distilling my API definitions down to the small possible unit as I possibly can. While I have many robust reference Postman collections an...
I am a big fan of tools that just augment our normal existence then make our lives easier without having to do much additional work. One of the tools that fits into this category is Optic, an open ...
I believe in going API first. I think it provides a positive step for development teams. I think it is one that makes sense for most enterprise organizations. But if I have learned anything in the ...
My friend Fran Méndez (@fmvilas) over at AsyncAPI asked me to share my opinions on Amazon’s EventBridge schema registry and discovery which is in preview. Something that is looking to be a pretty c...
I was creating a Postman collection for validating the status of Twitter users, where I was looking to extract a subset of data from the very verbose Twitter API response for a Tweet Lookup. There ...
I was asked on Twitter if I had any code for pulling the status of Twitter users. Since I am the API Evangelist, and the Chief Postman at Twitter I tend to prefer sharing of Postman collections rat...
I just created a new Postman collection for validating Twitter users via the Twitter API. As part of the Postman collection documentation and tutorial I included the steps for authorizing with the ...
I am all recovered from being at AWS re:Invent all week in Las Vegas, and gearing up for a Postman meetup in Seattle this Tuesday. I am stoked to be doing ane vent on my home turf, but I am aslo pr...
I heard a story this morning while having breakfast with someone at the Venetian before I made my way to the re:Invent registration counter which reminded me of the now infamous secret to Amazon’s ...
As I create each of the 50+ Postman collections for AWS services I am always striving for establishing as complete of a collection I as possibly can—this includes having examples for each API reque...
I was reading an article on Microsofts DevBlog about gRPC vs HTTP APIs. It makes the usual arguments of how gRPC compares with HTTP APIs. While the arguments for gRPC are definitely compelling, I f...
I’m sitting in the Seattle airport waiting for my flight to Las Vegas. I’m heading to AWS re:Invent, spending the entire week talking everything APIs with the masses at the flagship conference. It ...
There is always lot of discussion around the proper term to use for describing what it is we all do when it comes to getting the word out about our APIs. Some of use use the word evangelism, while ...
I had recently pulled all of the AWS Postman collections I have created and spread across Postman workspaces. After creating over 50 AWS Postman collections I learned some things along the way, and...
I’m getting more emails and DMs from startups doing what I’d consider to be integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solutions. These are services that help developers or business users integrate ...
I needed access to all of the AWS Postman collections I am building. The problem is they are distributed across multiple different workspaces. I had organized over 50 AWS Postman collections based ...
I’m working on 50+ AWS Postman collections at the moment, as well as crafting Postman environments for use across them. I’ve encountered some namespace challenges in this work, and I was needing to...
Finding your API key for an API provider can be a real pain in the ass. Depending on the account it can be buried deep within your settings, or possibly out in the back 40 in another separate devel...
I have been crafting Postman collections for as many AWS APIs as I can before re:Invent. As I work my way through the different APIs I”m reminded of the difficulties involved in API consistency and...
I am gearing up for API copyright heading to the Supreme Court, having another look at whether or not the naming and ordering of your API interface is copyrightable, as well as whether or not reimp...
I’m obsessed with making my Postman collections more accessible and executable to developers and non-developers. I’m really frustrated that on-boarding with APIs is still so difficult, and I’m dete...
I’m creating more Postman environments lately. I’m realizing the potential for using environments as a pivotal layer in defining and working with Postman collections. Environments are the missing i...
I am gearing up for API copyright heading to the Supreme Court, having another look at whether or not the naming and ordering of your API interface is copyrightable, as well as whether or not reimp...
I was talking with OpenCorporates CEO Chris Taggart (@countculture) while in Washington DC a couple of weeks ago, reminding me of a previous conversation we had about the current state of business ...
One of the things I have been thoroughly enjoying as part of my work with Postman is the many different ways in which Postman collections are being work. If you’ve followed my blog over the years y...
API storytelling is the number tool in my toolbox, and this should be the same for API providers and service providers. I know that many folks, especially the more technical folks snicker every tim...
I have many different workspaces defined within my Postman team account. I’m organizing a couple thousands APIs into different topical categories that help articulate the value they deliver. Once I...
Most companies I encounter who are doing API governance are purely focused on API design, with a handful also thinking more deeply about documentation, testing, monitoring, and other stops along th...
As part of my work as the Chief Evangelist for Postman I find myself regularly talking to other devrel, advocates, and evangelists who are looking for ideas on how to expand their evangelism toolbo...
I am gearing up for API copyright heading to the Supreme Court, having another look at whether or not the naming and ordering of your API interface is copyrightable, as well as whether or not reimp...
I have been working to migrate all the different API driven JavaScript solutions I have developed over the years and run on GitHub using Jekyll to operate self-contained Postman collections. Now th...
I’m crafting Postman collections in support of the upcoming re:Invent conference in Vegas in December. One of the first collections I crafted was for Amazon EC2, allowing anyone put the Postman col...
I received an email this last Friday that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on the freedom to reimplement APIs, as well as reconsider the copyrightability of APIs, and whether their reimple...
I was teaching a class to business users yesterday and they were very curious about being able to play with some of the public APIs that exist, but for me, once again I found myself struggling with...
My friend Lorenzino Vaccari (@lvaccari) asked me to help him with what I think of as an open API. Not to be confused with the OpenAPI specification, but an API that is “open”. I’ll begin with the s...
After some time in DC talking API governance I’m reminded that the “normals” are increasingly aware of public APIs, being able to actively discuss Facebook, Twitter, and other APIs, but are still v...
I am always wondering how much of the API sector is a construct of API providers, or something that was introduce by API service providers. Ok, I guess there is probably a third category of how muc...
Join Our Weekly API Governance Knowledge Bulding Sessions I just got back to Seattle from Washington DC after spending a day talking about data governance at the Data Governance Design Conferen...
After spending some time in DC talking about data governance and the role API definitions play in how we quantify the data we have, as well as how it is accessed by all stakeholders, I have a serio...
I have written several times about what a Postman collection means to my API discovery and search workflow. I have thousands of OpenAPI definitions indexed as part of my research, but until there i...
As I read the recent announcement about Stripe releasing a command line interface (CLI) I find myself think more about the reasons behind the recent resurgence of the CLI, and what makes it a growi...
I was on a call recently with some folks doing the hard work of moving the API conversation forward across their enterprise organization, and the topic of API governance came up (again). This is a ...
My friend Tim Burks (@timburks) over at Google gave a great workshop presentation at the API Specifications Conference (ASC) in Vancouver. His talk was on OpenAPI, GraphQL, and gRPC, but one phase ...
I think a lot about the words we use in the technology sector. What they mean, and what they don’t mean. One of the stops along the API life cycle I struggle with a lot is about how we descr...
I have had the pleasure of sitting in on several event storming sessions, where an organization is brainstorming the design of the next generation of their APIs, ensuring that every idea and resour...
I see it over and over—organizations learning new ways of thinking, moving beyond their legacy constraints by investing in APIs. This is one of the disruptive powers of APIs which can be all about ...
The banking API bunq purchased one of my API profile packages, so I spent some time this week going through what they offer. Every API provider who purchases one of my profiling packages will utlim...
My friend James Higginbotham had a really nice example of using APIs.json in a talk I saw him give the other day. It was one of those things that jumpstarted my desire to showcase different ways of...
I had someone email me a question the other day, asking about how they should respond when someone asks them why APIs are a better choice that using a direct ODBC / JDBC database connection. Before...
I was profiling the banking API bunq over the weekend and noticed they were managing their Postman collections on GitHub. I have long been an advocate for API providers to manage OpenAPI and Swagge...
I am a big fan of there being many versatile and competiting API definitions that describe many different dimensions of how we put APIs to work. I hear folks say that they’d prefer to have one sing...
After looking through 20 separate open source pages for leading API providers, here are the building blocks of an open source page I’ve identified. Overview: FMA - Tag Line - Simple phrase des...
I am a big fan of all API providers who offer sandboxes, and providing synthetic APIs, data, and other resources. It should be the default operating mode for anyone offering a public API, but it is...
I am at the Vonage Campus event today in San Francisco listening to a variety of talks from their team and partners. As I’m listening I can’t help but play around with their APIs, and explore what ...
I am spending time understanding how API providers have invested in their open source offerings. Mapping out which leading API providers have dedicated pages for showcasing not only the open source...
I regularly find myself shining a spotlight on the SalesForce API, holding it up as an example of why APIs matter. They are the OG API pioneer, and 20 years later they are still rocking it with the...
I process a lot of API documentation, trying to make sense of what each API does. As I wade through the human and machine generated API documentation for the different APIs I am profiling I am remi...
One difficulty I have telling stories across the API lifecycle involves the separation of stops along the API life cycle that are about each individual API, and those that are about serving the ent...
If you have been in charge of operating a public API you know how hard it is to get your APIs found. One important way you can increase the discoverability of your API is by embedding JSON-LD into ...
As I’m working through my tasks each day I am always looking for ways to automate away the cumbersome portions of what I need to accomplish. I am always weighing having to manually accomplish somet...
Channeling APIs, and cranking out API content i what I do. I find it pretty easy to regularly produce a regular flow of diverse content spanning the entire API life cycle. However, one challenge I ...
The API landscape is huge. APIs are being used to power desktop, web, mobile, and device applications across almost every business sector. While there are many common patterns used across the leadi...
I like machine readable definitions that are also human readable. Depending on how much you care about your API consumers, and how mature your API life cycle is, your will invest different amounts ...
The is my regular reminder that not everyone will care about APIs as much as I do. Most people just want to do their job, and aren’t interested in understanding the nuance of API design. I’d say th...
Having standard API practices established across our development teams plays an important role in pushing us to deliver more consistent and usable APIs. Establishing a feedback loop with API consum...
I’ve been working on a series of introductory API blog posts for Postman, helping introduce people to the concepts of APIs. When I do series like this I tend to get comments from people that the wo...
I think back regularly to my days as a database administrator in the 1990s, and the critical role I played in so many different organizations by being a keeper of the valuable data that was used to...
One of the biggest challenges I face in reaching API practitioners in my work as the Chief Evangelist for Postman is that most people in these roles are more focused on the day to day details of th...
You hear a lot about learning to code in the tech sector. I want to invest more in people “learning to API”. Not just developers, but anyone who wants to understand how to push back a little on the...
I am going through a bunch of different tutorials from API providers looking to motivate users to accomplish some fundamental API on-boarding task, or introduce them to some meaningful workflow inv...
API governance is a hot topic amongst leadership and stakeholders who care about the long term health of API operations. I regularly get questions from folks about what I’m seeing when it comes to ...
I am preparing for a busy week of conversation with folks at API World, and with an inbox full of requests to meet and discuss the challenges API providers and service providers face, I want to wor...
I am preparing for a busy week of conversation with folks at API World, and with an inbox full of requests to meet and discuss the challenges API providers and service providers face, I want to wor...
I am having conversations with different organizations about where to start with APIs, pushing me to revisit some of my previous API landscape analysis work, like an evaluation of the Department of...
I am preparing for a busy week of conversation with folks at API World, and with an inbox full of requests to meet and discuss the challenges API providers and service providers face, I want to wor...
I have written about this several times before, and it is something I will keep writing about until it comes true. Every API provider that employs OAuth for their APIs, show have a quick and easy, ...
I am getting ready for my first API event as the Chief Evangelist for Postman—API World next week. To help prepare us, Joyce Lin (@PetuniaGray), fellow developer relations team member shared some P...
It is common to think API-first just applies to new green field APIs being developed. However, I’d say that it should become a priority with addressing legacy APIs as well. I’m working to evolve my...
As I work my way through the features of Postman and work to bring it all into alignment with my existing storytelling around APIs, one of the areas I’ve been slowly adding to my collective API res...
I regularly receive emails from random strangers, as well as known individuals who I am working with, that contain JSON responses from an API request, asking for some analysis, troubleshooting, or ...
One of the biggest benefits from the evolution of the API management over the last decade was the visibility and awareness it gave us around who is using our APIs. While this is something that is p...
API folks are great at being passionate about the technologies they believe in. This is great for them, but it isn’t always great for the folks who aren’t quite as passionate and are just working t...
One of the high level API concepts I have been championing for a couple of years now is helping API providers move from a code-first approach, to an API design first, or as I like to call it, and A...
To help API providers understand the growing importance of how geographic regions can be leveraged, I distilled down my API regions research into the follow areas, resulting in this guide that is f...
I’m working on my strategy as the Chief Evangelist at Postman. We have a kick ass developer relations team and a passionate community of users who generate tutorials and other content, and while I ...
I crafted a pretty useful APIs.json index over the weekend. I thought it provided a pretty robust look at what APIs.json can do when it comes to providing machine readable API catalogs. This is a p...
I am working my way through the use cases on the Postman website, getting familiar with how their customers are using the platform. They have some very straightforward use cases that they have asse...
I like using the command line, but I get that it is intimidating for a lot of folks. I’m not 100% sure why, but at different points in my career I have embraced and distanced myself from the comman...
One of the benefits of doing APIs that we have always touted as API believers, is that APIs increases efficiency. We are able to move faster. Be more agile. Increased velocity of what our teams can...
I have been learning a lot about the different ways in which Postman users are using collections in my new role. One of the more interesting use cases I’m tracking on is for assisting the on-boardi...
I have been using Postman collections for a couple of years now. I have been auto-generating them from my central database alongside OpenAPI 3.0, and previously Swagger 2.0, as part of my regular w...
I’m working extra hard when it comes to creating APIs across every possible industry I can think of to help push my understanding of what Postman collections are all about, and what is possible whe...
As I was working to improve upon a couple of the API collections I’m building, and trying to assess at what constitutes a “complete enough” or “robust enough” collection, I noticed how the process ...
I was demonstrating to to someone how you can document the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) National Drug Code (NDC) API using Postman and I found a way to enrich real world APIs by publishing mo...
This API definitions guide is the result of almost 10 years of research and participation in the evolution of API definitions as part of community development, conferences, and the API efforts behi...
They made the Twilio referral program pretty straightforward, which is nice because many affiliate related solutions can be pretty cumbersome—it goes something like this: You get a personal ref...
As I was working to improve upon a couple of the API collections I’m defining, and define what constitutes a “complete enough” or “robust enough” collection, I noticed...
I am working to expand the vocabulary I use to search for new APIs. I already have a pretty extensive set of keywords and phrases I have from mining the world of APIs over the last nine years, but ...
I invest a lot of resources into spidering domains. I spend probably about $50.00 to $75.00 a month in compute resources to scrape domains I have targeted as part of my API research. This is someth...
Providing early access to your APIs is nothing new. It is something that all API providers should do whether they are publishing their APIs publicly or keeping them private for internal or partner ...
You ever feel like you just preach to the choir when evangelizing your API tool or service? I do. All the time! While crafting stories for the blog I am constantly burying topics that I find super ...
The government agencies, institutions, organizations, and companies that I talk to on a regular basis always express their desire to get a handle on how to consistently deliver APIs across the API ...
I had generated a Postman Collection for the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) the other day. Making a simple, easy to use, executable representation of any FHIR compliant API. I wa...
I wanted a ready to go supply of JSON examples from a variety of industries for me to use in my storytelling. No better place to begin with a project like this than with Schema.org, who provides a ...
A true test of any API service provider is whether or not they have an API. It is one of the most critical tests I have for any company who is selling a service to API providers. If you are sell se...
Going from an idea for an API, to something you can actually share with another team member or stakeholder is historically something that can take hours, days or even weeks. Even if you manage to c...
I have been working on healthcare APIs in government for over five years now, providing feedback regularly to the Blue Button API effort over at Health and Human Service (HHS), including having the...
As I craft stories for my blog I am always working to reach as wide possible audience as I can. It is one of the reasons I write so many stories, because the process helps me refine how I say thing...
When doing web services and API inventory at enterprise organizations I always come across one or two individuals or groups who are the keepers of the APIs, schema, and related knowledge and truth ...
I am now immersed in all things Postman. After a week at Postman, attending POSTCON, and listening to how API developers are putting the API development environment, I have realized what a Swiss ar...
I need a couple of generic APIs for some storytelling and workshop materials. Just some basic example of web API in action managing some common everyday resources like notes, products, and company ...
Looking through the ASC program schedule I am seeing coverage of the entire API toolbox, covering REST ,Hypermedia, GraphQL, gRPC, and event-driven APIs, with representation for JSON Schema, JSON-L...
This is part of my on-boarding work as Chief Evangelist with Postman. Part of my work to understand how Postman users are putting the platform to work is to process earch one of their use cases in ...
I’m currently processing the common Postman use cases, and overlaying what the platform offers in context of historically what I’ve called my API lifecycle research. I plan on brining my vision mor...
I thoroughly enjoy engaging with my wife when it comes to APIs. She has been along for the entire API Evangelist ride, and she has absorbed more about APIs from listening to me talk about APIs than...
As some of you may have heard, I joined Postman as their Chief Evangelist last week. What does this mean? It means I will be telling a LOT of stories about my journey with the Postman team. Abhinav...
EasyPost spoke at the Postman User Conference (POSTCON) last week, and while they shared a number of very interesting stories, one that really stuck with me was about how they create Postman Collec...
This is a story derived from work to help develop a Postman Collection that could be used by the International Space Apps Challenge, establishing a machine readable definition for all the NASA APIs...
I have hundreds of collections within my Postman, but I’ve never done much collaboration with others in there until now. I find myself getting more organized with the Postman collections for API Ev...
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 ...
The latest major version of the event-driven API specification format AsyncAPI is ready for production. The AsyncAPI community has been working hard in recent months to hammer out the next generati...
I’ve talked recently about a second coming of API management, which in my opinion is a wave that has several fronts. One of those fronts I see rolling out is in the area of event-driven API infrast...
I am spending some time grounding my views of the API landscape. Working my through all of my beliefs, and systematically blowing them to bits to see how they hold up against the stress of reality ...
While spending time doing some research into schema management tooling I came across the Confluents Schema Registry. The schema management solutions is one of the first formal tools I’ve come acros...
I am been finally seeing the investment across the API sector I wanted to see when it comes to API documentation. There are multiple API definition driven API documentation offerings available on t...
p>While my work as the API Evangelist can burn me out some of the time, I generally find it intellectually challenging. The work takes me from industry to industry, country to country, and to th...
I prefer my API complexity at the path, query, then schema levels of my API design—specifically in that order. I don’t mind a huge number of individual API calls to get the job done because I just ...
I do a lot of thinking about API management. After almost a decade of contemplating how we manage our API infrastructure, I feel it is still the most important stop along the API lifecycle. I don’t...
I migrated the main API Evangelist site off of GitHub the other day. The moved followed the migration of 100+ network sites of my API research a couple of weeks back. While I still have a handful o...
I was looking through the OpenAPI definitions I have harvested via some automated scripts I have running, and I came across an API definition that had a variety of URLs available for their APIs, ma...
I have seen it play out over and over since I began monitoring the API conversation. Companies who launch APIs to power a mobile application but refuse to, or are unaware of how they should be cont...
Most API providers I speak with see the value of consistently delivering API infrastructure to power desktop, web, mobile, device, and network applications. Less than 10% of these providers see the...
Most API providers I speak with see the value of consistently delivering API infrastructure to power desktop, web, mobile, device, and network applications. Less than 10% of these providers see th...
I spend a lot of time running web and mobile applications through a proxy to reverse engineer their APIs. I generally use Charles Proxy for routing my desktop, web, and mobile traffic through, whic...
There are some jobs on the Internet I apply for no matter what my current situation is, and an API policy domain specialist at Twitter was one of them that popped up recently. I applied for the job...
One of the toughest parts about teaching people about APIs is that there are many different views of what the API life cycle can be depending on who you are, and what your intentions are. As an adv...
As we approach the fall it is time to begin thinking about the conference season, and what the most relevant API conferences are. I haven’t been doing any events this year, but staying in tune with...
I am an empathic human being. It is one of my top strengths, as well as one of my top weaknesses. It is also one of the most important tools in my API toolbox. Being able to understand the API expe...
In my world API definitions are more valuable than code. Code is regularly thrown away and rewritten. API definitions hold the persistent detail of what an API delivers, and contain all of the prop...
I fully surfed the first wave of API management. API Evangelist began by researching what Mashery, Apigee, and 3Scale had set into motion. API Evangelist continued to has exist through funding from...
I fully surfed the first wave of API management. API Evangelist began by researching what Mashery, Apigee, and 3Scale had set into motion. API Evangelist continued to has exist through funding fro...
As API providers, it can be easy to find ourselves in a very distant position from the consumers of our APIs. In recent weeks I have been studying the impacts of behavioral approaches to putting te...
General evangelism around what APIs are, as well as more precise advocacy around specific APIs or groups of API resources takes a lot of work, and repetition. Even as a seasoned API evangelist I ca...
I wrote a separate piece on an API gateway specification standard recently, merging several areas of my research and riffing on a recent tweet from Sukanya Santhanam (@SukanyaSanthan1). I had all t...
I find that the most interesting and telling API building blocks come out of the companies who are furthest along in their API journey, and have made the conscious effort to heavily invest in their...
I wrote a separate piece on an API gateway specification standard recently, merging several areas of my research and riffing on a recent tweet from Sukanya Santhanam (@SukanyaSanthan1). I had all ...
The inspiration for this post wasn’t fully mine, I’m borrowing and building upon what Sukanya Santhanam (@SukanyaSanthan1) tweeted out the other day. It is a good idea, and something that should be...
I have been studying uses of behavioral technology lately. Riffing off my partner in crimes work on the subject, but putting my own spin on it, and adding APIs (of course) into the mix. Applying on...
One story I tell a lot when talking to folks about APIs, is how you can reverse engineer a mobile phone to map out the APIs being used. As the narrative goes, many companies that I talk with claim ...
When you are in the API game you hear this phrase a lot, “didn’t we already do that?”. It is a common belief system that because something was already done, that it means it will not work ever agai...
I have been playing with the new browser reporting API lately, and while it isn’t widely supported, it does work in Chrome, and soon Firefox. I won’t go into too much technical detail, but the API ...
I’m in the business of providing access to the API knowledge accumulated over the last decade. Despite what many people claim, I do not know everything about APIs, but after a decade I have picked ...
I’m in the business of providing access to the API knowledge accumulated over the last decade. Despite what many people claim, I do not know everything about APIs, but after a decade I have picked...
Ironically one of the biggest challenges facing API discovery on the web, as well as within the enterprise, is that most conversations focus purely on the technical, rather than the human and often...
I’ve been watching the API observability coming out of Stripe, as well as Honeycomb for a couple years now. Then observability of systems is not a new concept, but it is one that progressive API pr...
Public APIs have always benefitted from something that internal APIs do not always received—-feedback from other people. While the whole public API thing didn’t play out as I originally imagined, t...
I’ve invested a lot of time in the last six months into various research, scripts, and tooling to help me with finding APIs within the enterprise. This work is not part my current role, but as a si...
Storytelling is important. Storytelling within the enterprise is hard. Reaching folks on the open web is hard work to, but there is usually an audience that will eventually tune in, and over time y...
I have quite a few API driven bookmarklets I use to profile APIs. I recently quit using Google Chrome, so I needed to migrate all of them to Firefox. I saw this work as an opportunity to better de...
I have quite a few API driven bookmarklets I use to profile APIs. I recently quit using Google Chrome, so I needed to migrate all of them to Firefox. I saw this work as an opportunity to better def...
I know you believe your tools are the best. I mean, from your vantage point, they are. I also know that when you are building a new API tool, your investors want you to position your tooling as the...
I have built successful startups. I’m good at the technology of delivering new solutions. I am decent at understanding and delivering much of business side of bringing new technological solutions t...
I’ve been studying API developer portals for almost a decade. I’ve visited the landing pages, portals, websites, and other incarnations from thousands of API providers. I have an intimate understan...
I have built successful startups. I’m good at the technology of delivering new solutions. I am decent at understanding and delivering much of business side of bringing new technological solutions ...
One of the biggest reasons we adopt new technology, and justify the development of new technology, is we do not want to do the heavy lifting when it comes to what we already have in place. A common...
I see a lot of happy path bias when it comes to the development of APIs, but specifically when it comes to crafting testing to ensure APIs are delivering as expected. Happy path is a term used in t...
I have struggled asking this question in many discussions I’ve had around the world, at technology conferences, on consulting projects, and in the back rooms of dimly lit bars. What is an applicat...
Data work is grueling work. I’ve been working with databases since my first job developing student information databases in 1988 (don’t tell my wife). I’ve worked with Cobol, Foxpro, SQL Server, Fi...
I have struggled asking this question in many discussions I’ve had around the world, at technology conferences, on consulting projects, and in the back rooms of dimly lit bars. What is an applicati...
I have struggled asking this question in many discussions I’ve had around the world, at technology conferences, on consulting projects, and in the back rooms of dimly lit bars. What is an a...
APIs are notorious for going away. There are so many APIs that disappear I really stopped tracking on it as a data point. I used keep track of APIs that were shuttered so that I could play a role i...
APIs that I can’t pay for more access grinds my gears. I am looking at you GitHub, Twitter, Facebook, and a few others. I spend $250.00 to $1500.00 a month on my Amazon bill, depending on what I’m ...
At every turn in my API work I come across folks who claim that declarative APIs solutions are superior to imperative ones. They want comprehensive, single implementation, do it all their way appro...
I was conducting an accounting of my API design toolbox, and realized it hasn’t changed much lately. It is still a very manual suite of tooling, and sometimes services, that help me craft my APIs. ...
I am big on regularly interrogating what I mean when I use certain phrases. I’ve caught myself repeating and reusing many hollow, empty, and meaningless phrases over my decade as the API Evangelist...
I am building out several prototypes for the moving parts of an API search engine I want to build, pushing my usage of APIs.json and OpenAPI, but also trying to improve how I define, store, index, ...
I have a mess of APIs.json and OpenAPI definitions I need to make sense of. Something that I could easily fire up an ElasticSearch instance, point at my API “data lake”, and begin defining facets a...
I always find an API providers business model to be very telling about the company’s overall strategy when it comes to APIs. I’m currently navigating the difference between two big API providers, ...
I am always pushing for more schema order in my life. I spend way too much time talking about APIs, when a significant portion of the API foundation is schema. I don’t have as many tools to help me...
I always find an API providers business model to be very telling about the company’s overall strategy when it comes to APIs. I’m currently navigating the difference between two big API providers, t...
I always find an API providers business model to be very telling about the company’s overall strategy when it comes to APIs. I’m currently navigating the difference between two big AP...
Last week I put some thoughts down about the basics of my API rating system. This week I want to go through each of those basics, and try to flesh out the details of how I would gather the actual d...
I have a lot of OpenAPI definitions, covering about 2,000 separate entities. For each entity, I often have multiple OpenAPIs, and I am finding more all the time. One significant challenge I have in...
I was having a discussion with my friends working on API policy in Europe about API discovery, and the topic of failed open data portals came up. Something that is a regular recurring undercurrent ...
There are a number of concepts we cling to in the world of APIs. I’ve been guilting of inventing, popularizing, and spreading many myths in my almost decade as the API Evangelist. One of them that ...
There are a number of concepts we cling to in the world of APIs. I’ve been guilting of inventing, popularizing, and spreading many myths in my almost decade as the API Evangelist. One of them that...
I find myself looking at a number of my more complex API designs, and saying to myself, “this isn’t complicated because it is hard, it is complicated because I did not spend the time required to si...
I find myself looking at a number of my more complex API designs, and saying to myself, “this isn’t complicated because it is hard, it is complicated because I did not spend the time required to s...
I have been working on various approaches to rating APIs since about 2012. I have different types of algorithms, even having invested in operating one from about 2013 through 2016, which I used to ...
I can’t get API discovery out of my mind. Partly because I am investing significant cycles in this area at work, but it is also something have been thinking about for so long, that it is difficult ...
I have been working on various approaches to rating APIs since about 2012. I have different types of algorithms, even having invested in operating one from about 2013 through 2016, which I used to...
I’m a big fan of Schema.org. A while back I generated an OpenAPI 2.0 (fka Swagger) definition for each one and published to GitHub. I’m currently cleaning up the project, publishing them as OpenAPI...
I find that a significant portion of I should be doing when defining, designing, developing, and delivering an API is all of avoiding complexity. Every step away along the API journey I am faced wi...
I find that a significant portion of I should be doing when defining, designing, developing, and delivering an API is all of avoiding complexity. Every step away along the API journey I am faced w...
I like my OpenAPI tags. Honestly, I like tags in general. Almost every API resource I design ends up having some sort of tagging layer. Too help me organize my world, I have a centralized tagging v...
I like my OpenAPI tags. Honestly, I like tags in general. Almost every API resource I design ends up having some sort of tagging layer. Too help me organize my world, I have a centralized tagging ...
Two years later, I am still working to define the API driven marketplace that is my digital self. Understanding how I generate revenue from my brand (vomits in mouth a little bit), but also fight o...
My time working in the API sector has been filled with a lot of lessons. I researched hard, paid attention, and found a number of surprising realities emerge across the API landscape. The majority ...
I found myself scrolling down the home page of API Evangelist and thinking about what topic(s) I thought were still the most relevant in my mind after not writing about APIs for the last six month...
After six months of silence I've decided to fire API Evangelist back up again. I finally reached a place where I feel like I can separate out the things that caused me to step back in the first pla...
After eight years of storytelling I have decided to step back from API Evangelist. There just aren’t enough nutrients in the work to sustain me financially, ethically, or creatively. It has been a...
