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Stories about the technology, business, policies, and people of APIs.
It has been a while since I looked at the 250K view of what is going on with APIs across federal government agencies in the United States. Since working for the Obama administration in 2013 I am pe...
I have struggled to properly articulate to partners the potential of publishing API collections to the Postman API network, as well as via public workspaces. Most folks I talk to see Postman collec...
Sometimes I need to do bulk updates to Postman collections and there is no better way to automate this than to use a Postman Collection that uses the Postman API—inception level stuff, so be carefu...
The Federal Trade Commission is sueing Facebook, alleging that they are illegally maintaining a monopoly on the personal social network space using a continued series of anticompetitive behavior. T...
I have been neck deep in the release of Postman public workspaces lately. So much so, I haven’t had much time to gather my thoughts about what exactly they are, and why they matter. Time for a burs...
I have long been fascinated by the Run in Postman Button. A Run in Postman button can be published from any Postman collection, organizing a single, or a series of API calls into collection of API ...
Sometimes I need to do bulk updates to Postman collections and there is no better way to automate this than to use a Postman Collection that uses the Postman API—inception level stuff, so be carefu...
What is an API? An API is a digital interface for sharing data, content, and algorithms with web, mobile, and device applications using the Internet, building on web technologies to make digital r...
I am using Postman to do more governance on my OpenAPI definitions as part of their API lifecycle. This is a top request of customers I am talking to, so I want to get better at make these individu...
I am managing more collections via hundreds of different workspaces lately. As part of my work I am needing to make bulk changes to collections based upon a variety of properties. Sometimes I need ...
I am having an increasing number of conversations around how the leading API specifications work together, and what the role of each are when it comes to various stops along the API lifecycle. To h...
Managing the size of an OpenAPI is a common challenge for API development teams. I have regular conversations with teams about the ways in which you can minimize the overall scope of an API, breaki...
I owe an answer on my thoughts about mocking APIs to my coworker Andy, and I don’t want to incur his wrath, so I figured I’d write it up and share wider as I was getting back to him. I don’t have t...
API deployment is the OG stop along the API lifecycle, but is still the most underserved when it comes to API service providers providing solutions, and as part of the full lifecycle API management...
I have been conducting weekly discussions around API specifications each Friday mornings which I call the API Specification Toolbox. The goal is to just identify ways in which we can drive more dis...
I have a single API request that is becoming the first call I make on a growing number of Postman ccollections. It is a call to the Postman API to pull the OpenAPI for any API I am managing using P...
I am pushing forward a handful of conversations with enterprise organizations about how to better formalize their API lifecycle workflow. To help me load up my talking points in my head I wanted to...
When you sign up to access most APIs you will have to sign up for an account, create an application, and retrieve a set of keys and / or tokens before you will be able to use the API. This is stand...
The COVID-19 API resource center we launched back in April at Postman was a success. It generated a lot of traffic and API usage, but also brought in about 75 API submissions from the community. On...
I have been working with my friends over at APIMetrics on the COVID-19 and U.S. Election resource centers we launched recently. These API resource centers are all powered by an APIs.yaml index, pro...
One of the regular patrons of my weekly Friday open office hours around API specifications has been with API expert Marjukka Niinioja (@mniinioja), and a couple of weeks back we carved off 30 minut...
This is a talk I gave Saturday this last morning to almost 100 students in India, helping demonstrate the potential of APIs when it comes to their career. It is easy for me to stay entrenched in a ...
I have to write these posts every so often to help folks understand who I am and what it is I do as the API Evangelist. You see, there are regular streams of people who attempt to define me based u...
My partners in crime Metadata Technologies North America (MTNA) and I are working on identifying the best election data and API resources available today, and one of the gems out there, when it com...
I am including the U.S. Census API in a couple of different projects in the queue, and to help me make the API more discoverable and usable by developers I needed an OpenAPI and Postman collection ...
One of my current tasks at Postman is to help explore what the future of API deployment looks like. When I went into this work I expected serverless to play a significant role, but I have to admit ...
I am continue my storytelling around the work I am doing with Nimbella to help define what the future of API deployment looks like from within Postman, and next up on my list to do some storytellin...
I am hung up (once again) on the fact that I can’t post to my personal Facebook feed via the Graph API. Facebook removed the ability for you to add or update to your Facebook feed via the API in 20...
I am working on several demonstrations of what is possible when you use OpenAPI on the Postman platform, and as part of this storytelling I want to use the OpenAPI of leading API platforms to demon...
I am working on several demonstrations of what is possible when you use OpenAPI on the Postman platform, and as part of this storytelling I want to use the OpenAPI of leading API platforms to demon...
I am working on several demonstrations of what is possible when you use OpenAPI on the Postman platform, and as part of this storytelling I want to use the OpenAPI of leading API platforms to demon...
I am working on several demonstrations of what is possible when you use OpenAPI on the Postman platform, and as part of this storytelling I want to use the OpenAPI of leading API platforms to demon...
Like other successful API patterns REST and GraphQL have been in competition for mindshare since GraphQL emerged on the landscape. GraphQL folks love to say it is a replacement for REST, and the RE...
One of the teams I work closely with at Postman is the group behind mocking APIs with Postman. The ability to statically mock APIs has received a lot of investment when it comes to recent releases,...
HTTP APIs, or as they are often referred to as REST APIs, are always the base layer for any API operation. This is where everyone should begin, but there are a number of other healthy patterns in u...
The discovery of APIs has been the single most significant issue I’ve tracked on and contributed to over my career as the API Evangelist. It is also one of the stops along the API lifecycle I have ...
I was needing a simple way to move forward a variety of API conversations I am having, ranging from COVID-19 APIs to API service providers who are using OpenAPI. I need a quick way to be able to fl...
I am getting more hands-on with my API governance guidance while working at Postman. It is one of the reasons I joined the company, so I could move more into the execution of my API lifecycle strat...
I am giving a presentation to my friend Ken Bauer Favel’s (@ ken_bauer) class of computer science sutdents at Tecnológico de Monterrey (@TecDeMonterrey) tomorrow, and I wanted to prepare an overvie...
I am working on profiling open specifications as part my work at Postman to help highlight how we can deploy APIs that use a common API and schema, reduce friction when on-boarding, while also incr...
I have been moving forward a number of new types of Postman API collections as part of my Union Fashion reference implementation at Postman, and one of the new types I’m using as part of different ...
I am having this conversation with multiple API providers right now, so I wanted to write it up, share it as part of these conversations, while also making it available for my wider audience here o...
I am having this conversation with over five separate API providers right now, so I wanted to write it up, share it as part of these conversations, while also making it available for my wider audie...
I am doing deep dives into each stop along the API lifecycle, beginning with deployment and management, to better understand how we can bring other features into Postman, without actually developin...
This is a repost from the Postman community on a very slick COVID-19 data project with accompanying Postmn collection to actually work with the data and get back responses, and then view responses ...
I am working to better understand the Moesif Analytics API so that I can define a new type of Postman collection I am calling an API management collection. You wouldn’t use this collection to make ...
I am making my way through all of the partner conversation I am having, publishing stories for each of the conversations to help me move each one forward. Today I am focusing on API management prov...
I am working my way through profiling API analytics provider Moesif. I have a pile of partner related work accumulating and there is no better way to work through what is going on than just writing...
I am profiling a number of API management APIs right now and reaching out to each of their teams to discuss moving forward a set of official API management collections that I can have published to ...
<p class="p1">OpenAPI has been around for five years now. There really is no reason for so many folks are still talking about Swagger 2.0, when there are more benefits associated with the Ope...
It can be difficult to understand exactly what OpenAPI is and what it isn’t sometimes. I get a lot of questions from folks who don’t entirely grasp what the OpenAPI specification is, a...
One of the areas I am working on defining at Postman is how we partner with API providers, and API service providers. We are doing a lot of partnering right now, but we do not have a formal program...
I am working my way through all of the partner work I have on my workbench, and there is no better way to work through it than to write it out as blog posts here on API Evangelist. I just talked ab...
I recently harvested all of the open source tooling that is being built on the OpenAPI and Swagger specifications from GitHub. I am looking to better understand what people are doing with the speci...
I conducted the first OAI Demand Generation Public Office Hours last Friday. On behalf of the OAI I am looking to generate more awareness and demand around the specification, helping bring togethe...
I like researching and thinking more about each of the 13 AsyncAPI protocol bindings. It paints a picture of the past, present, and future of APIs for me. Leveraging AsyncAPI to define your event a...
I have been asked by more than 10 people in the last couple of weeks for more information for helping them make sense of the whole event-driven API landscape. I have all kinds of links available, a...
I am making my rounds with folks in the API community talking about the next generation of the OpenAPI specification, getting people to move beyond Swagger 2.0, tooling and service providers to ado...
I started planning API Evangelist in July of 2010 after I saw what was happening with APIs being used in the cloud, and powering mobile applications. By September I had a plan in place, and I figur...
I am speaking tomorrow at 1PM Pacific time about using Postman collections and environments to define and power the API lifecycle at apidays INTERFACE. I am stoked that I get to have a dream job wh...
My head is swirling from a flurry of exciting meetings around what different Postman features are being worked on currently. I can’t speak directly on the features until they are released, but I am...
I spent the last week looking through open source tooling built around leading API specifications. If you are tuned into the RSS or Twitter feed from this blog you probably saw the exhaust from my ...
Continuing my journey through all of the leading API specifications I pulled the top open source projects that I could find via via the GitHub API. Pulling the cream off the top of what is being bu...
I have made my way through the open source community around Postman, OpenAPI, Swagger, AsyncAPI, JSON Schema, GraphQL, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and Avro. Next up is RAML. Looking at the open source ...
Specification protobuf - (forks: 11358) (stars: 42046) (watchers: 42046) - protocol buffers - google’s data interchange format Serialization flatbuffers - (forks: 2251) (stars: 14468) (wa...
I am picking up my research into the open source tooling that is built around the common API specifications, and after looking at Postman collections, OpenAPI, Swagger, GraphQL, and gRPC, I wanted ...
Specification avro - (forks: 1066) (stars: 1594) (watchers: 1594) - apache avro is a data serialization system. Registries schema registry - (forks: 736) (stars: 1234) (watchers: 1234) - ...
Specification asyncapi - (forks: 77) (stars: 1139) (watchers: 1139) - the asyncapi specification allows you to create machine-readable definitions of your asynchronous apis. Documentation ...
Specification api blueprint - (forks: 2095) (stars: 7969) (watchers: 7969) - api blueprint Generators aglio - (forks: 489) (stars: 4480) (watchers: 4480) - an api blueprint renderer with ...
Specification grpc - (forks: 6625) (stars: 26420) (watchers: 26420) - the c based grpc (c++, python, ruby, objective-c, php, c#) Implementations grpc - (forks: 6625) (stars: 26420) (watch...
I have done several dives into the world of GraphQL. As part of some API specification work I am not getting another chance to look at what the open source community around GraphQL looks like. Alon...
I am finally finding time to pick up some old work quantifying the open source that has risen up around API specifications. I just pulled all the GitHub repos when you search for “Postman” and “Ope...
I am finally finding time to pick up some old work quantifying the open source that has risen up around API specifications. I am pulling all of the open source tooling available on GitHub when you ...
I am finally finding time to pick up some old work quantifying the open source that has risen up around API specifications. I am pulling all of the open source tooling available on GitHub when you ...
I had begun playing around with the concept of API brokers back in 2014, and it is something that is recurring and evolving in a handful of the conversations I am having in the Postman ecosystem la...
Business is anything but usual these days. I have a lot of time on my hands when it comes to writing and working online, but the reality in the chair is anything but easy. When I sit down to tackle...
I am tasked with defining what sharing and collaboration means when it comes to API operations at work. I have never had a tool like Postman to help me define how we work as a team across an organi...
I’d say one of the most controversial aspects of the world of APIs involves the places where people are used to and prefer to deal with API complexity at. After you look at thousands of APIs you be...
I had some thoughts bouncing around in my head the last couple days about where the value in this whole API game actually resides. When it comes to the types of APIs I am seeing be deployed, and wh...
I am fleshing out ideas from a couple of recent conversations around API life cycle religion and philosophy. We’ve made our way through several lofty ideologies around how you should or shouldn’t d...
I am working up towards a loftier piece on the importance of RBAC to the API life cycle, and as part of my research I was going through all of the documentation postman has for roles and permission...
I was playing around with my co-worker Sue Smith’s Learn by API project today, and found it to be a pretty powerful usage of Postman for not just teaching users about Postman, but also teach them a...
I have had a pretty massive API story in my notebook for a couple of weeks now that I just didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to process, but eventually I’m finding the energy to think about APIs ...
I would say today reflects the purpose of API Evangelist in my world. Helping me get through the work I have on the table, while expanding my awareness of what is going on in the world of APIs. Mo...
I have used Postman in a handful of webinars and takes recently to demonstrate how you can quickly go from idea to a tangible usable API. My goal is to equip myself with a way to I can quickly demo...
I find that it helps to have defined boundaries for your APIs. If you have the resources and interest I recommend studying subjects like domain driven design. Investment in properly defining the bo...
This is the narrative from one of the last webinars I did for Postman oin my API-first e-commerce reference implementation Union Fashion. I always try to write what I am going to be saying furing a...
After over a decade of API evolution, API deployment is still much more of a dark art than it is something that ever sees the light of day. Sure you can setup a pipeline for an API, making a known ...
After over a decade of API evolution, API deployment is still much more of a dark art than it is something that ever sees the light of day. Sure you can setup a pipeline for an API, making a known ...
When it comes to deploying APIs with AWS infrastructure using a Postman collection, there were two things I couldn’t do purely with AWS APIs, which pushed me to create AWS Lambda functions that wou...
I struggle with using the right words in my API storytelling. Striking a blend between what people are saying across the sector, and what people should be saying. There are many words and phrases i...
One Product Catalog With Multiple Destinations Products are a ubiquitous resource in an online world. By 2000, if we were selling products in the real world, we also began needing to publish produ...
There are surprisingly few meaningful API numbers to showcase across the API sector. There are few API or API service providers who have a view of the landscape that can produce meaningful numbers,...
I got an email from GitHub after firing up an older Postman collection I had. The collection was originally engineered to just pass in a GitHub token using a query parameter, which historically has...
I do a lot of API blah blah blah’ing about abstract technical concepts. Sometimes I am able to craft a coherent narratives around some complex technology goings on, but most of the time I am just p...
Framing the COVID-19 Testing Location Problem Before I dive into what I built, let me talk a little about how I landed on this being a problem in the first place, which is an important first step ...
When it comes to coping with the stressful world unfolding around us I like to lose myself in my work. Data and APIs is a great way to tune out the world and keep myself busy while in isolation. Li...
I use Cloudflare for my DNS. I like the threat protection they offer, the dead simple DNS management, and their robust API. I automate the management of a handful of my domains. Providing maintenan...
If you have followed me over the years you know that I get very frustrated by the access or lack of access to APIs, as well as the services and tooling that target the sector. As someone who is pe...
I am working my way through defining a more precise definition of what API-first means which I can use across my API storytelling and conversations. I workshopped the widest definiti...
I really struggled with this piece on API-first. It is one of those holistic API advice pieces I am very conflicted about. API-first feels like yet another marketing phrase or latest trend like mic...
I worked through my thoughts on what API first is, which I consider to be the outer layers of what is going on when we use this phrase. I wanted to focus on the technical and business rift that exi...
I am working on the vision for the Postman Network. As I do with everything, I want to start with the basics human aspects of what is going on, and then relate them to the more technical and then b...
I’m doing a deep dive into partner API research, taking a fresh look at how API providers and service providers are operating their partner programs. I looked through around a hundred partner progr...
An AWS EC2 Reference Collection An example of a Postman reference API collection can be found in the collections I worked on leading up to AWS re:Invent last December. One of the reference API col...
I am trying to better understand how we all work together to deliver and consume APIs. Fleshing out more meaning behind some of the common words we use in the space such as collaboration, platform,...
I was pondering a tweet from Aidan Cunniffe (@aidandcunniffe) over at Optic they other day. He was expressing what he says is a “controversial opinion that keeps getting backed up by conversations...
It is natural for developers to want to roll up their sleeves and begin coding to deliver an API. It is what they are trained to do. However, it makes a lot more sense to involve business stakehold...
Environments are an essential building block to be considered as part of wider API governance strategy. Like Postman collection, environments will need the greatest amount of governance to inject t...
The World Wide Web, commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators, which may be interlinked by hypertext, a...
I regularly take a look at what different universities are up to when it comes to their APIs. I spent two days talking with different universities at the University API summit in Utah a couple week...
I was doing some investigation into how journalists are using APIs, or could / should be using APIs. After some quick Googling, Binging, and DuckDuckGoing, I came across a workshop by David Eads o...
I went to Provo Utah a couple weeks ago and participated in the sixth annual Brigham Young University (BYU) University API Workshop. I was the keynote opener for the first edition of the conference...
This an overview of possible strategies for governing how Postman is used across a large organization. It is common for Postman to be already in use across an organization by individuals operating ...
Let’s take what we’ve learned from Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and others. Let’s look at the general security landscape, but let’s get more creative when it comes to coloring within the lines of an...
API access, integration, and automation should be the default with everything you do online—desktop, web, mobile, and device applications all use APIs. Your API infrastructure is no different. Post...
I am working on redesigning all of my base APIs, as well as produce a mess of new ones. As part of the process I am determined to be more thoughtful and consistent in how I design and deliver the A...
I have spent a lot of time automating my AWS API infrastructure, working to make it so I can automatically deploy API infrastructure to AWS. I am using AWS API Gateway as part of this suite of API...
I’ve showcased ClokudFlare’s approach making their API available as part of their user interface several times now. It is a practice I want to see replicated in more desktop, web, and mobile applic...
As API providers and consumers we tend to have access to a significant amount of credentials, keys, tokens, as well as personally identifiable data (PII). We use this sensitive information througho...
APIs operate using the web, but like web applications, many API require some sort of authentication or authorization before you can access the valuable resources available within each API path. Whe...
As I was profiling APIs on my list of APIs I found myself profiling Adobe. I am moving through the list of companies alphabetically, so you can see how far along I am. Anyways, like any other large...
I set out to understand the role that Postman can play in an Azure DevOps powered API life cycle. I was fully prepared to crash course Azure Dev Ops, and begin mapping out the role that Postman can...
I got introduced to the CA.gov Alpha Team by my fellow government change maker Luke Fretwell (@lukefretwell) the other day, and I am beginning to tune into what they are up to in similar ways to ho...
I have been evolving my definition of what my API toolbox covers, remaining focused on HTTP APIs, but also make sure I am paying attention to HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 APIs, as well as those that depend on...
I am heading to London in February to talk to the UK government about APIs. They invited me out to talk about my history of work with government in the US and EU, and share my views of the API life...
I am neck deep in the expansion of what I consider to be my API toolbox, and I have been spending time mapping out the world of EDI. If you aren’t familiar with the Electronic Data Interchange (ED...
I like studying APIs. I like to think about how to do APIs well. I enjoy handcrafting a fully fleshed out OpenAPI definition for my APIs. The challenge is convincing other folks of the same. I see ...
I am continuing to iterate on what I consider to be a modern API toolbox. API Evangelist research is born out of the SOA and API worlds colliding, and while I have been heavily focused on HTTP APIs...
I am spending time thinking more deeply about how APIs can be delivered via Azure. I spent much of the holidays looking at how to deliver APIs on AWS, but only a small amount of time looking at Azu...
I am working my way through doing more work around the multi-cloud deployment of APIs and spending some more time on the Azure platform here in 2020, and I found their getting started page pretty r...
I am going to invest in a new way to tell stories here on API Evangelist—we will see if I can make this stick. I enjoy doing podcasts but I am not good at the scheduling and reliable repetition man...
If you read my blog regularly you know I rant all the time about having to sign up for new APIs and then find my API keys and tokens. API providers excel at making it extremely difficult to get up ...
When you hear enterprise organizations talk about API governance they usually mean the governance of API design practices across the organization. This is the place where everyone starts when it co...
My boss asked me if I could build a Postman collection that would pull our future events from Evenbrite and display ticket counts for each individual event. So I got to work hacking on the Eventbri...
I am going to spend some time flagging some of the new APIs who do rise the to the occasion, but while I am working on that I wanted to pose some questions about why we haven’t seen the Twilio and ...
We even have the vocabulary to describe all of the details of my API (OpenAPI), and I still can’t just push a button and get my API. I can take my complete OpenAPI definition and publish it to AWS,...
You can use Postman to test your APIs. With each request you can include a test script which evaluates each incoming response and validates for specific elements, displaying the test results along ...
As a Postman user for a number of years I have several hundred random collections littering my personal workspace. I had noticed that workspaces emerged a while back, but really hadn’t ever put muc...
I am amazed at the number of blog posts I come across for API providers explaining how their API consumers can use Postman with their API, but do not actually share a complete Postman collection fo...
I’m always fascinated by the words we use to describe what we do in a digital world. One dimension of the API life cycle that perpetually interests me is the concept of deploying an API, or as some...
I began API Evangelist research almost a decade ago by looking into the rapidly expanding concept of API management, so I think it is relevant to go into 2020 by taking a look at where things are t...
I get asked a lot if Postman is open source. I get told ocasionally that people wish it was open source. I have to admit I didn’t fully grasp how open Postman was until I helped work on the new ope...
Don’t get me wrong, if you want to just gateway an existing API using AWS, Azure, or Google, it is pretty straightforward. You just have to learn each of their mapping techniques and you can quickl...
There always seems like there are two separate types of tools in my world, the academic tools that consider the big picture and promise to steer me in the right direction, and then there is the str...
You know, I tend to complain about a lot of things across the API space while focusing on the damage caused by fast moving technology startups and the venture capital that fuels them. Amidst all of...
I have been cranking out the Twitter API capabilities lately, crafting single request Postman collections that focus on a specific capability of the popular social API. I use the API for a number o...
I have been a pretty hardcore Postman user since the beginning. Over the years I felt like I understood what Postman was all about, but one of the first concepts that blew up my belief around what ...
I have been working on developing new ways to make the Salesforce API more accessible and easier to onboard with over the last couple of months, helping reduce friction every time I have to pick up...
I’m burning my way through profiling, updating, and refreshing the listings for about 2K+ APIs in my directory. As I refresh the profile of each of the APIs in my index I am looking to make sure I ...
I have had a machine readable schema for defining API pricing for almost five years now. I’ve profiled common resources like email, SMS, and others, but ultimately haven’t had the resources to inve...
Your API is always the best. Of course it is. However, not everyone will see the value your API delivers without a little enlightenment. Sometimes the value of an API is missed in isolation when yo...
I regularly struggle with the words and phrases I use in my storytelling. I’m never happy with my level of word-smithing, as well as the final output. Ultimately I don’t let it stop me, I just push...
I created a bunch of different Postman collections for AWS services leading up to re:Invent this year, and now I’m using individual requests to deliver on some different Postman AWS API life cycle ...
I had grown weary of just researching, talking, and teaching about the API lifecycle over the last ten years as the API Evangelist. This was one of the major motivators for me to join the Postman t...
I was reading about what the Census is doing to prepare for the 2020 census over at GCN. I’ve been invested in what they are doing at Census for some time now, so it makes me happy to see where th...
I’ve been tracking on the API from the US Census Bureau since they launched in 2012, and even met with them to discuss their strategy over the last couple years. The team at the Census Bureau has s...
