I am revisiting the fundamentals of my API evangelism toolbox. My personal definition of what evangelism is, as well as algorithm shifts and evolves over time, and writing about it always helps me make sure I am moving forward. This post is also the outline for a couple of presentations I have coming up, so I’d like to workshop in different ways here on the blog leading up to these conversations. Extracting from previous posts, and tightening up based upon what I am doing these days, here is what I have.
Topics
The key words and phrases that define my world.
- Primary - The top of my 5-10 key words and phrases.
- Secondary - The next 25-50 key words and phrases.
- Industry - Understand the words used in an industry.
- Interests - Making sure I throw in interesting topics.
- Discovery - Always working to get outside the bubble.
Channels
Keeping the channels I am using well defined.
- Textual - Publishing blogs, docs, and guidance.
- Videos - Producing 60 second or 15 minute videos.
- Messaging - Crafting useful email and chat messages.
- Discussion - Utilizing Git issues and forums for discussion.
Hands-On
Making everything something you can get your hands-on.
- APIs.json - The machine-readable business details.
- OpenAPI - The machine-readable technical details.
- JSON Schema - Standardizing JSON or YAML schema.
- Collection - Portable, documented, executable collections.
- Environments - Workable and reusable environments.
Workspaces
Always focusing on the work being done in specific locations.
- Git - Utilizing public or private Git orgs and repositories.
- Postman - Leveraging public or private Postman workspaces.
- IDE - Making available locally in integrated development environments.
- CLI - Making available locally in command line interfaces.
Metrics
Measuring everything being produced to understand impact.
- Messages - How much discussion and questions produced.
- Views - The number of times anything has been viewed.
- Watches - Track the number and duration of what is watched.
- Forks - Count the number of times work is being forked.
- Stars - Tracking the number of stars that anything has.
- Shares - Counting how many times something is shared.
Time Frame
Acknowledging that time and space matters with evangelism.
- Moments - All of this work must happen in real-time during work.
- Self-Service - As much as possible should be available self-service.
- Ephemeral - Some content will only live in a single moment in time.
- Repeat - Identify the cycles and repeat what is working the best.
That is my recommended toolbox for on the web or within the enterprise. Things will vary from industry to industry and enterprise to enterprise. This is a distillation of 15 years of evangelism. It is platform agnostic, although GitHub, Postman, and VSCode play an outsized role in my world. I manage most of my content in GitHub repositories. I manage all of my artifacts on GitHub and in Postman. It is up to you to find the topics and channels that matter the most. You can find which metrics are meaningful and what time frames work with your way of operating. I try to keep the hands-on portion and workspaces as universal as possible.
I will work on a deck and some visuals for this round of work on my API evangelism toolbox definition. I will also be building this into the new API Evangelist platform dashboard I am working on. For me, there is no separate between operations and evangelism. They happen in the same motion. Evangelism can’t be extra work. It is work. I don’t sweat the metrics and I try to ride the waves, but also stay true to the messaging I personally feel matters the most. You will have to find the tone and cadence that works for you, your team, who you work for, and the industry you operate in.
