API Governance is About Limiting Speed
I am all about API governance these days. In my day job, and evening thoughts. I am no longer a cheerleader for all things APIs, unless they serve API governance. As I take all my observations of t...
Stories from 2023
Stories about the technology, business, policies, and people of APIs.
API Discovery is Hard
Providing useful API discovery solutions is hard. I have dedicated 15 years to understanding and trying to provide solutions to this problem. I regularly gather my thoughts on this subject and inve...
Using Spectral As An API Ratings System
When Steve asked me what we could do with APIs.io, I knew I wanted to improve upon what APIs.io v1 was as an API search, but I also lay the groundwork for what we need to help alleviate our API dis...
APIs.io APIs.json Goodness is Back
Steve Willmott came to me asking what we should do with the APIs.io search engine. I don’t have much interest in developing tooling these days, but I am interested in hardening and moving forward o...
The Right Way To Do the API Is Always Negotiated in the Moment
I used to believe there was a right way to do APIs. I don’t anymore. I know better. I’ve seen too many APIs. I’ve seen too many people get frustrated that we didn’t do the API in the right way. Any...
Seeing Code Execution Differently At The API Gateway
When I published my recent story about where API gateways might be going, I received pushback the most about my inclusion of code execution as a core platform capability. Which I would agree with i...
Where Is This API Gateway Thing Going?
According to Gartner, the full lifecycle API management quadrant is going away, but acknowledges in 2023 the API gateway continues to enjoy an outsized amount of focus when it comes to internal and...
Twilio Makes for a Nice and Clean Example of APIs.json
You really can’t find a better example of APIs.json, then the one for Twilio. Twilio doesn’t have their own official APIs.json (yet), but I created one that I think really shows the strength of the...
A Starter APIs.json for Amazon Web Services
I need a master APIs.json for Amazon Web Services. I need an index of all the AWS APIs I depend on, and would like to have an index of the rest when I am ready to put to work. It is a daunting chal...
Why API Design-Time Matters in a API Gateway Run-Time Dominated Reality
The API gateway is the center of our universe when it comes to APIs. This is a reality operationally because when shit works or does not work, this is where the joy and pain is found. This is a rea...
Do Not Do That API — It Will Not End Well
One of the best things about writing on API Evangelist is I get to explore territory you don’t when working at an API service provider. There is no venture backed startup that will let me write a b...
APIs Dictating Reality In Our Physical World
I am thinking a lot about all the ways in which APIs don’t just define our online world, but also our physical world. On Saturday mornings I normally go for a walk in Central Park to chase squirrel...
A Schema-Driven Address API Negotiation
I recently finished Democracy’s Data, The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them, and the book was the closest thing to capturing how I see the Application Programming Interface, or...
Exploring an Idea for an APIs.json Defined Workflow
I have been thinking deeply about API workflows lately. Meaning, how do you chain API requests together in a certain order. There are many valuable API resources available out there that become eve...
Open Source Educational Resources on Modern APIs
Everywhere I work I find myself reinventing the wheel when it comes to educational resources about APIs. There are many new topics to come along since I started in this game, but there are so many ...
Strongly Typed API Operations
I was fascinated with the rise of JavaScript as a ubiquitous but loose client-side programming language in our browser, but then also the introduction of it on the server-side with Node.js. I see a...
The Great API Unbundling
I have been talking about the expansion of needs when it comes to API operations, the lifecycle, and governance for a number of years now. I have been hearing it called the great unbundling of API ...
My API Platform or Yours?
You hear the phrase API platform a lot from vendors across the API space. It is just one of many phrases in the world of APIs that is more a funhouse of mirrors than actually a meaningful set of wo...
Positive API Behavioral Reinforcement
I started API Evangelist because people were telling me I was doing the REST API thing wrong, and being pretty shitty about it along the way. I don’t mind being corrected, but when the RESTafarians...
Governing the Title of Your APIs With Spectral Rules
I enjoy how developing Spectral rules to govern an API slows us down to think about what matters. Really this is the biggest problem I see with people building APIs—-they are just moving too fast, ...
An Emphasis on the Politics of APIs
While making my way around the API landscape for the last thirteen years I have seen that many of the words we use describe APIs are the same, but the meaning of these words will vary depending on ...
Twitter and Reddit APIs Are the Canaries in the Public API Coal Mine
I have long considered Twitter to be one of the most important APIs to there. With its former status as the town square for the world, the Twitter API provided an unprecedented view into how our wo...
What is Next for API Evangelist
After flipping the page on yet another chapter in my career and beginning a new chapter focused on the application programming interface (APIs), I am left once again with the burning question — wha...
AI has a metadata problem…
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a captivating and transformative field, capturing the imagination of individuals and industries alike. As I immerse myself in the world of AI, I feel, as man...
Elevating My Awareness of Artificial Intelligence
I am not excited about recent evolutions in artificial intelligence (AI) as many others are, but as with APIs, I am looking to find and follow the story. This is something that takes regular studyi...
The People’s Network - The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age
I just finished reading The People’s Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age by Robert MacDougal. It was fresh look at the early years of the telephone network, and how th...
My Personal Evangelism Algorithm
I was sharing my personal algorithm for how I approach evangelism. It isn’t very complex but is something I have evolved over the last decade plus and kept interesting through switching up the topi...
Contrasting API Contract Testing and Functional Testing
I am neck deep in very philosophical debates around API specifications and testing right now, which I am working with my team get more precise in how we discuss API testing and avoid drowning in th...
Live By APIs Die By APIs
One of the things I love and hate about the API universe is that if you live by APIs, you will often times die by APIs, unless you can perpetually dial in just the right balance across how much val...
We Are Just Swiping Credit Cards, Doing Our Accounting Using Multiple Sets of Books, and Do Not Allow Time for Budget Planning in the API Space
I heard a phrase this past week that when it comes to APIs—that we are all just swiping the credit card and then working to do accounting after the fact. So much truth. I would augment that state w...
The Most Important API Layers To Focus on in the Enterprise
As folks turn their attention to artificial intelligence, productivity, and other distractions emerging across our technology dominated worlds, I am taking a moment to assess the areas that I feel ...
Y’all See API Contract Testing Like You Do Terms of Service
I keep working through my API contract testing discussions with folks. I wrote about getting pedantic when it comes to API contract testing last night to help me get a grasp on things, and I am wor...
Getting Pedantic About API Contract Testing
I am immersed in very detailed and pedantic discussions lately about API contract testing lately. Like many phrases in the world of APIs, the phrase contract testing gets thrown around a lot, witho...
Learning About Railroad Regulation in the Empire Express
I just finished reading the Empire Express by David Haward Bain. It took me a couple months as I read on the side and contrasted with other more nourishing reads from widely different universes. Ho...
How I Use Postman for Algorotoscope — API-First, No UI Needed
One of the things I really like about Postman as a platform is that I really can go cheap on the user interface. I have several APIs in which I do not have any UI. I only need the data managed via ...
The Source of Truth for an API
I was talking with Laurent Broudoux (@lbroudoux) and Yacine Kheddache (@YadaYac) over at Microcks this week. As I listened to them discuss the intersection of multiple API protocols like HTTP, gRPC...
Using ChatGTP to convert human knowledge into machine actionable formats
Human knowledge has naturally for centuries been captured in human friendly formats such as books, intended to be consumed by, you guessed it, humans. But our world has changed dramatically and we ...
Twitter Should Be Able Charge for Their API Because It Costs Money to Operate
I’ve heard this phrase seven times now from people on Twitter and LinkedIn-—that Elon Musk is just making a business decision to charge money for the Twitter API because it costs Twitter money. In ...
Twitter Is the Most Important API
I am pissed about Twitter shutting down free access to their API. It genuinely breaks my heart. I’ve seen many people who do not quite grok how I feel, so as I do with any topic, I am looking to do...
A Loose Federation of API Standards
I am corresponding back and forth with what I will call an open source and API standards therapist for now, helping me make sense of the ocean of API standards I am drowning in and assisting me in ...
My Mastodon #FollowFriday Postman Collection
I have been making a number of Postman collections to help automate and scale my new Mastodon universe, and when I share them I get one of two responses: 1) these are awesome and I’ll be putting th...
One Possible Vision for API Commons
Everything in this world seems to occur in cycles, with many patterns I’ve wrestled with years ago coming around again. In 2014, in the heart of the Oracle vs. Google, me and my partner in crime St...
What Comes After Microservices?
Good API trends can linger on for some time, but as with the decline of monolith, many love to anticipate the death of microservices through strangulation by its own distributed weight. While event...
Remembering How I Built API Evangelist As I Rebuild My Social Presence
As I work to rebuild my social presence via Mastodon, I am reminded of how I built API Evangelist using Twitter and my blogs between 2010 and 2020. I am very invested in API platforms these days, a...
Can you read or write? A metadata story.
This is a short story about metadata (I have to assume at this point you can read). About why a data file or dataset on its own is inadequate for analysis or research, and therefore insufficient to...
Will I become a Rustacean?
I was recently reading this article about “Why Python is not the programming language of the future”. I’m not sure whether this will happen, but the author makes some very interesting points. One t...
How to Draw an Owl, the API Edition - Part One
I am down in the quantum realm when it comes to API operations. Working at the atomic level when it comes to how we do APIs. One of my favorite ways to make fun of APIs is to use the How to Draw an...
Mastodon #HashTags as an API Search Engine
I am fascinated with cultivating the hashtags that come through my Mastodon instances. I have two domains setup. Kin Lane and API Evangelist. My personal one is more photos, libraries, travel, outd...
Postman Interceptor But for Product Managers
I was talking to someone yesterday about the growing need to reverse engineer what is happening across this sprawling API landscape. While there is a lot of focus on having an API strategy, standar...
Need synthetic data? Mockaroo to the rescue
Data intelligence and Metadata Inference I recently spent some time exploring one of my favorite data intelligence related topics: metadata inference. How do we take an undocumented dataset, like a...
Make Legacy APIs Visible To Highlight Technical Debt
If you tune into my storytelling, you’ll hear me say this a lot—-APIs are hard to see. Any API, but more importantly, legacy APIs are just really hard to see. As a result, it is very difficult to q...
Make Incidents Visible and Informing the Shift Left
I am always looking for ways to help teams fight the good fight when it comes to cultural change across API operations. The technology of APIs takes a lot of work, but it never requires as much wor...
Federated Mastodon API Automation Building Blocks
I am making more progress on automating my Mastodon world. Throughout the holidays I spent time getting to know the Mastodon API, forking and iterating upon an OpenAPI for the API, and generating a...
Looking Through a Federated Lens Across Mastodon, FHIR, and PSD2/3
I am immersed in the federated Mastodon universe the last month, and I’ve been immersed in the federated universes of FHIR, PSD2/PSD3, and UK Open Banking for a number of years. It is unlikely that...
Federated Convergence With Mastodon, Enterprise API Governance, and Government Regulation
I’ve mentioned lately on social media that there was a federated convergence occurring right now. Not just across the Mastodon explosion that has happened recently, but also enterprise customers I ...
API Platform vs Full Lifecycle API Management
I was just on a call where I heard one of the more succinct definitions of the difference between Postman and the waves of “Full Lifecycle API Management” solutions that have come before us. API Ma...
Mastodon Opening the Age of Federated APIs
I have been immersed in the Mastodon universe since Thanksgiving. I have been growing my network for both my personal and professional domains, and have been playing with the Mastodon API daily. I ...
Time, Markets, and APIs
I frustratingly see APIs everywhere in a world where most do not even know what an API is while also simultaneously using them thousands of times each day. I see and hear the gears of this new digi...