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Stories about the technology, business, policies, and people of APIs.
I’ve had many, many, many people over the years accuse me of being a shill for technology because my brand centers around API Evangelist. It is common for people to look at what I do at face value,...
A common narrative that plays out in my household is my wife asking me if I know some authors name, me saying no I do not, and her spending about 3-5 minutes letting me know how I should know this ...
I am working on some new approaches to telling consistent visual stories around the API Lifecycle, and I have a list of small little common API testing scenarios I will be working through as storie...
I am working on some new approaches to telling more consistent visual stories across the API lifecycle. I have a list of common API testing scenarios I will be working ny through as stories here on...
You can see the benefits of good API design practices all across the API ecosystem, but also across all of the web and mobile applications we use each day. If you suffer from the same condition I d...
I’ve looked at all the gateways out there today. I’ve been studying API management since 2010. While there are numerous characteristics that define the next generation of API gateways, in my mind t...
I just got a Mastodon instance setup for my Kin Lane domain. I am being thoughtful about this shift in my social presence, but as with every other aspect of my digital life, I am most interested in...
GraphQL is designed to handle numerous data use cases and and is particularly we suited to adjust to potentially changing data structures and content. But there are situations where the challenge i...
Like most things online today, I am striving to not be emotional about what is happening with Twitter right now. I have signed up with an existing Mastodon node, with the intent to set up my own se...
The other day I was looking for a domain name to host APIs and related services for various R&D projects I’m involved in. When that’s the case, I usually stick to the classic .com and .org top ...
I am perpetually working on what I consider to be the essential API dimensions that ground how we talk about APIs. While having a common definition of the API lifecycle, as well as a clear list of ...
I’ve spent a lot of time lately contemplating how I feel about Elon Musk taking over Twitter, and specifically about how I feel about the exodus to Mastodon that I see happening. As with many thing...
I was talking with John Kilgore our product manager at Postman for the Postman API Network about strategies for making APIs more visible across teams, meeting teams where they are and enabling them...
I am working my way through 100+ Breaking Changes podcast conversations I have had , as well as 75+ customer conversations I have had this year, and reflecting on a book I just finished called The ...
I regularly spend time with business and technical leadership at large enterprise organizations where I walk through my big picture strategy around the API Lifecycle and governance. 90% of these co...
I am diving into the regulation of some of the major industries within the United States to better understand how regulation may unfold for the web using APIs. We are already seeing regulation in t...
This is a question I heard several times this week, but have been consistently hearing it from customers, analysts, and others in my orbit. I think it is an important question, but it is also a ver...
I conducted another assessment of the APIs available across the federal government this weekend. It is work I enjoy because I always learn so much while doing it. I learn about government agencies ...
Every couple of years I get motivated to take a fresh look at what is happening with APIs across the federal government. Since I worked for the Obama administration I have had a passion for underst...
Choosing the right data type for a dataset variable, database fields, data model element, or API property can make a huge difference in terms of usability and quality. A mistake that I have commonl...
I joined in on some conversations around data and APIs with the White House this week and it got my juices flowing again when it comes to understanding APIs. One of the biggest challenges in doing ...
I have long advocated that API producers should spend more time being an API consumer, so that they can feel the pain. I feel 100x this since I have been working at Postman. When you operate at the...
I am working on version 2.0 of the content API I am using as part of my work across Postman Open Technologies. It is a little meta, but I have an API for managing the content I produce and then dis...
I have been thinking deep thoughts about API gateway and management offerings for the last couple of weeks. I am refreshing my memory of what has happened over the last decade with each wave of API...
I always enjoy conversations about API management providers or more specifically what API gateway providers should or shouldn’t be providing as they work to specialize or be everything to everyone....
Data in its current state is insufficient to meet the needs of users and intelligent applications. It needs to be elevated to digital knowledge by supplementing it with machine-actionable metadata...
Albert Putnam(@AlbertPutnam) tuned me into the fact that ProgrammableWeb is shutting down this month, after seventeen years of operation. I have mixed feelings about this, in that I don’t tune into...
I am trying to write nightly here on API Evangelist, capturing at least one thought from my work with APIs. One of the areas of API operations I am doing a deep dive into right now is the familiar ...
I have learned a lot about influencing the way people think about APIs. I am not always successful in influencing people the way I desire, but I have had a significant amount of success in shaping ...
I do not write on API Evangelist as much as I used to. I still write a lot, but posts tends to stay in my notebook or get published to the Postman blog. I miss writing every day. Writing is importa...
Identifiers are used everywhere to be able to unambiguously reference resources. Examples, amongst many, include a passport number, a domain name, a book ISBN, a database record key, a UUID, a netw...
The use of extensions in Open API Specification (OAS) has been supported since version 2.x based on a minimalistic approach whereby anyone can define a property starting with x- (e.g. x-myextension...
I have been hearing about the challenges with keeping API portals, catalogs, directories, networks, hubs, marketplaces, and other similar constructs with the needed metadata, and adequately providi...
I was talking with Preetham from our product team at Postman last week about how much we’ve grown and how are messaging has shifted. Postman has 20M users, and while our bottom-up messaging is stro...
One of the most powerful capabilities of the Postman platform is the concept of a workspace. Like many powerful concepts, it is also very misunderstood, not seen, and wildly underutilized as part o...
Before I tell this tale, I want to make it clear I am not looking to disparage anyone who has worked at SmartBear, or still works there, and this is purely my opinion as the API Evangelist, and doe...
A rite of passage for most new Postman employees is creating their first collection. I asked my new collection developer Bello Gbadebo (@gbahdeyboh), or “Debo”, to spend his first week on his first...
I enjoy a privileged perspective of the world of APIs. It has been one that I have carefully crafted over a decade in the space. I experience and engage with a lot of perspectives, and I am always ...
I learned a new phrase a couple of months ago, and it is a phrase I have been hearing more and more amongst the conversations I am having on my Breaking Changes podcast, and with Postman customers ...
When you ask people involved in API operations what API management is you’ll get a whole mix of answers. API management as we are sold it emerged out of the SOA world around 2006. Over the years it...
I hear enterprise organizations say that they need a single service provider to offer a bundle of services that meets all of their needs. I’d say this is the result of years of being told by analys...
I love the spectrum of API awareness that exists out there, and the challenge of trying to figure out how to move people “forward” across that spectrum. One of the most visible metrics of where an ...
A co-worker of mine Bob Fahey said a customer had asked what the twenty problems that Postman is solving for developers in 2022. I am in writing mode this afternoon so I figured I’d craft a post to...
I have learned so much from my partner Audrey Watters over the twelve years I have been with her, but one of the most powerful concepts I have picked up from her and ran with in my own way is the i...
Almost every enterprise organization I know struggles with knowing where all of their APIs are. There are always shadow and invisible APIs that exist across the enterprise API landscape, and at wit...
API governance is still very much mired in the design phase of evolution, focused on the consistency in design of a single API. And while we all have a lot of work to onboard the enterprise masses ...
When you talk about API governance, 90% of the people you encounter will assume you mean the governance of a single definition of an API, and not multiple versions of an API, or the operations and ...
It is that time again. Time to remind myself, and anyone who reads this, why it is that I pay attention to APIs. There are many people who simply hear my title and make all kinds of assumptions abo...
I am really struggling on a number of calls lately with people at companies who are doing really interesting things with APIs, having fully committed themselves to prioritizing APIs across the orga...
