Saying Things Are Broken is Broken
You read a lot of posts about “X” being broken. Especially in the age of AI smoke and mirrors. Everything that came before and in need of disruption is broken. In the API realm I exist within, OAut...
Stories from 2025
Stories about the technology, business, policies, and people of APIs.
Capabilities Are Everything You Need To Integrate With AI
I am back to my work to precisely define how we integrate with many different APIs. With this round I am doing it for a handful of use cases meant to satisfy customer conversations around their AI ...
Capabilities Are About Having An Honest Conversation About Control
I am deep into capablity thinking. I am having some interesting conversations which I will be publishing as podcasts, blog posts, and white paper shortly, but I need to keep hammering on some thoug...
The Web and APIs Weren’t Built for Autonomous Agents, They Were Built For Humans
You hear this a lot—especially from AI folks. I just read it again in an excellent, but very academic paper, Agentic Web: Weaving the Next Web with AI Agents. I’ll reference their research in my ow...
API Discovery Will Need To Be Contextual and Ephemeral
I’ve learned over my career that there is no single source of truth for APIs. I’ve been looking for it for 15 years. It’s a mirage—“free beer tomorrow.” I’ve spent a long time studying why Programm...
MCP is a Valid Tactical Response
I hear it a lot from people and GPTs about JSON RPC (ie. MCP) being simpler, direct, explicit, and possessing a reduced overhead. All true. It is a remote procedure call using JSON. You just want t...
OpenAPI Extensions to Generate What You Need for AI Integration
I’ve been spending a lot of time bouncing between different perspectives on automation to assess what’s truly needed for AI integration. The enterprise teams I’m talking with are most interested ex...
Schema-Validated, Rules-Guided, and Policy-Driven Experiences
I struggle to share the entirety of my vision for API governance as it requires prior awareness of multiple API specifications and the current state of governance within the industry—with some lean...
As a Startup You Should Not Be Consulting
A common refrain you hear from investors and advisors as you navigate the technology landscape is that it’s a bad idea to do consulting. I also hear that you should be selling as early as possible,...
Why Drift Is Ubiquitous
I have done a lot of thinking about how difficult it is to get people on the same page, but also keep them there after my time standing up an API governance program at Bloomberg last year. I went t...
Applying Domain-Driven Driven Design to Integration and Consumption
At Naftiko, we are reshaping integrations as business capabilities through the alignment of the technical details with business strategy using domain-driven design. Domain-driven design is a fundam...
How This Moment Will Shake Out
I don’t usually talk about what is around the corner. I am more about understanding history, and telling stories in the present. However, after several cycles now I am feeling like can develop a “v...
What is a Capability?
I have several folks asking me what I mean when I say capability in the context of what we are building with Naftiko. I have been writing about API capabilities in the context of the journey from A...
Conversations With Enterprise Product and Engineering Teams Has Given Me More Empathy About This Moment In Tech
I have been having conversations with a lot of folks about API integration, consumption, and automation as I work to build Naftiko. I entered into these conversations with folks in the early part o...
Selfish Standardization Using JSON-LD for Job Postings
I have become an API standards realist over the years. Yes I believe we should all strive for a common good through the standardization of APIs, but I’ve become all to aware of the misalignment of ...
Trust is the Secret Ingredient Missing in API Discovery
There is lots of renewed energy around API discovery latetly, but this round is in service of Agentic AI automation. There is a lot of speculation surrounding Anthropic’s release of an MCP Registry...
Minimizing Ambiguity in Business Alignment Using APIs
Business alignment in the world of API integrations is essential—from both a producer and consumer perspective. The challenge is that there are different bubbles of business alignment that leaves p...
The Intersection of API Rate Limits, Plans & Pricing, and Marketplace Working Things Out
Before I understood the business and politics of the API hustle I used to cry fowl here on API Evangelist about the sudden shifts in plans and pricing for APIs, as well as the unfair and restrictiv...
Solutions That Speak To Your Tactical Pain While Expanding and Scaling Your Strategic Pain
One of our trusted advisors for Nafitko sent this tweet over to me about there being a big consultancy opportunity involved with “finishing folks Replit and Loveable apps”. I chuckled because this ...
There Is Only API Consumption
I have hit the wall one more time in the last five years when it comes to my belief that people producing APIs will want to do the right thing. Whether it be API design-first, productization of API...
Can We Have a Conversation About API Discovery, Integration, and Consumption?
As we work to build Naftiko, we are interested in talking with people about what they are facing when it comes to putting APIs to work. Throughout the summer we will be having conversations with pe...
API Evangelist & Fourcast Media Are Partnering To Bring Kin Lane and LeTroy Gardner Together Again For A New API Podcast
While at API Days in NYC a couple weeks ago, I heard from several people that they missed the Breaking Changes podcast when I was the host. And that the show had a certain tone and line of question...
I Will Be Joining Naftiko as the Chief Community Officer
I have been engaged in a number of conversations with folks since I left Bloomberg last August, consulting and exploring different ways that I can work with startups and enterprises to govern APIs....
Ontological vs Epistemological API Governance
I see two distinct types of API governance unfolding within enterprises who view their operational culture and their workforce having different levels of understanding and respect for leadership. I...
Developers Will Listen When API Governance Is Injected Into IDE Via Artificial Intelligence
I have heard it several times now, folks in charge of API governance sharing with me that they are finding success in injecting API governance into developers workflow using artificial intelligence...
The Business and Politics of API Automation
I learned over a decade ago why API discovery isn’t a solvable problem within the world of technology—the people in charge of the narrative don’t see business, they see technological solutions. Pun...
Automobiles Are Also Agentic
I am an equal opportunity hater of automobiles as well as the Internet. I see them both as equal destroyers of the earth and humanity. Of course, one can argue that both of these technologies have ...
Standardizing OpenAPI Extensions to Override Spectral Rules
While continuing to process the Spectral rules in use by API producers as part of their efforts to govern their API operations I am always looking for interesting and useful patterns being applied ...
Feedback Loops in Tech Reveal Who the Customers Are
You hear a lot about feedback loops with customers in technology and the world of APIs. There are entire disciplines dedicated to establishing and managing feedback loops with customers as part of ...
You Have No Choice But To Do Open This Round
I learned about the usage of the word “open” the hard way during the Web 2.0 dayz. I was the frontline of the open data and open API (and OpenAPI) push. Like with APIs, I was the face of various ch...
Automation Does Not Require Agents
The spell of AI is strong today. It is difficult to escape. Most do not have a choice. I am not here to do the work for folks to compare the latest AI moose diarrhea with reality, but I am here to ...
API Integrations Are What Matters to Business
I know many of us have bought into the API management messaging and the APIs as a product vision over the last ten years. It is a logical response to obtaining and maintaining a handle on the API s...
Where Is Developer Advocacy?
I have witnessed a lot of discussion and defense of what developer advocacy is over the years, and as I watch what is happening right now with artificial intelligence and labor, I am left dreaming ...
The Right API Policies, Process, and People Helps Minimize Enterprise Technical Debt
API governance policies are meant to cover a wide range of operational areas, which begin with API design considerations like which HTTP methods we use to communicate around our digital resources a...
Shape Shifting for AI
I heard it repeatedly at API Days in NYC last week-—apologies from people doing AI, and positioning their marketing and storytelling to speak to AI. People know me, know my brand, and know that API...
OpenAPI Aligns Your API Code With The API Gateway Configuration
It takes work to strengthen the awareness engineering teams have surrounding OpenAPI. OpenAPI is often seen as simply a configuration for producing API documentation, or possibly for generating cli...
Embracing Rather Than Overcoming Team Boundaries
Mapping the API landscape across an enterprise should always include the mapping of team boundaries. The outcomes of your API governance will be shaped by these boundaries, resulting in many API go...
Governing API Authentication
Governance spans multiple dimensions of our API operations, but few areas get people thinking and talking about API governance than talking about the security of your APIs. I am working with custom...
Developing Spectral Rules for AWS API Gateway OpenAPI Extensions
You can lint your OpenAPI artifacts in your CI/CD pipelines, but if you aren’t actually using it to configure your API gateway, and then validating the outputs of the configuration are in alignment...
Where Should API Governance Occur?
For teams who have adopted a design-first approach to APIs governance happens during the design time, and if your team is code-first it happens in the IDE during development time. If you are an eng...
API Governance is Social
As I was reading the Study of Man Adjusting Men to Machines I kept thinking about how API governance is actually about people, despite the focus on the technical details of the design of APIs. I th...
We Should Get Some Business Stakeholders Involved With APIs
Isn’t it strange that we are regularly talking about the need to get business stakeholders more involved in doing APIs? Like us engineers producing and consuming APIs operate in some liminal space ...
Healthcare Needs API Storytelling To Enlighten the Space
Having been out on the front line of API storytelling since 2010 I can attest to the reality that you need a lot of stories to be told before people understand the digital resources and capabilitie...
Know Your API Consumers (KY(A)C)
The age of build and they will come API portals with free tiers across your APIs is over. Web, mobile, and even device applications were friendlier versions of API consumers that may (or may not) h...
API Governance Rules from the Netherlands
It helps to have positive examples of how to do API governance. In my experience most people, teams, and enterprises tend to just emulate the vendors and other players that they are already tuned i...
Using the United States as a Lesson of What Not To Do With APIs
The majority of my consulting clients are international in this moment. It is interesting to start every meeting with commentary and discussion on the current administration in the United States, b...
The Top Three Industries In Need of API Regulation
I have been tuned into and contributing towards the regulation of APIs for payments and healthcare space for a number of years. I feel that the work to regulate payment APIs must continue being the...
On-Premise Before Cloud As API Virtue Signal
I am advising a company who operates outside the United States on the development of suite of enterprise-grade API solutions. One question I had while learning about their offering was whether or n...
APIs Role In Understanding Tech Platform Monetization Systems
I am spending more time thinking about where good APIs go bad, and it is something that has helped me understand how things change once a platform moves beyond doing the original thing they are kno...
APIs Pull You Out Into The World
I heard someone at an API security conference here in NYC a couple weeks back mention how most of the API management, security, and governance solutions out there didn’t really meet their needs cau...
API Products are Fantasy
I’ve long been a proponent of treating your APIs as a product. I still believe in all the moving parts of what we collectively believe to be an API product, things like customer centricity, bridgin...
Showcase the Team Behind an API
When implementing API governance a lot of attention gets paid to the technical surrounding the API, while investing in the team behind an API will also help standardize and deliver more consistent ...
HTTP APIs Provide Awareness Around Who Is Using Your Digital Resources
I am fielding more questions about, and participating in discussions around companies, organizations, institutions, and government agencies who are looking to build defenses around their digital re...
No Auth on Initial MCP Was Not A Bug, It Was A Feature
It is fascinating to watch all the pundits jump and respond to the MCP rush on top of the AI hype happening. Everyone was quick to point out that MCP does not have the adequate authentication and a...
Know Your API Consumers and Employ Appropriate API Rate Limits
I have long been an advocate for wide self-service API onboarding with loose rate limits, but in the age of artificial intelligence I’ve gotten much more conservative. APIs have always been about i...
100% of Access to Enterprise Digital Resources Should Be Via APIs
HTTP APIs have evolved over the last quarter century to be the standard for how you make digital resources and capabilities available in web, mobile, device, and artificial intelligence application...
You Are Not Taken Seriously If You Are Not Doing or Talking About Artificial Intelligence
I have heard this on LinkedIn for two years now, and continue to hear it said privately by people who aren’t AI believers, but due to their position in the market are forced to comply and have to p...
API Evangelist Is Just Saying No To Artificial Intelligence
I am taking a firm stance on saying no to artificial intelligence in its current incarnation. I still use machine learning, specifically Tensorflow as my Algorotoscope protest to the bias in the ma...
We Need More APIOps Cycles, Arazzo, Overlays, and We Get MCP and A2A
Technologists are good at seeing and building technology, but aren’t so good at seeing the business things. We’d rather invent entirely new specifications and approaches to things rather than havin...
The Divide Between Business and IT Is Just an Accountability Sink
I have worked to identify, discuss, and narrow the classic line between business and IT for this entire century. Every bit of my work as the API Evangelist has been focused on reducing the barriers...
The API Governance Rule is Just a Representation of What Matters
I find myself in a lot of “rules don’t matter” conversations with folks, telling me that Spectral rules alone won’t govern enterprise API operations. It is a perspective that also plagues OpenAPI a...
Why Would a Normal Person Want To Understand the API Traffic Behind Their Applications
I find the traffic behind our online web and mobile phone activity to interesting. I am exploring how to use Mitmproxy to pull back the curtain on the APIs in use by the applications I depend upon....
Using Common Instead of Centralized
As I have developed my understanding of how folks within enterprises wield certain words I am pulling back from using the word centralized to using the word common. There are some things that could...
When Applications Demand All the Attention
A big part of the API evolutionary story was that web APIs were used to via the web between 2000 and 2010 to power widgets, affiliate programs, and other ways of sharing information via HTTP. Once ...
Reverse Engineering the APIs Behind Everything With Mitmproxy
Pulling back the curtain on the web and mobile applications we use each day is a common way for us to make sense of how things work. I have regularly used Charles Proxy to map out my personal and p...
There Is No Single Approach or Tool For API Governance
It is always interesting to come up against the anti-education and anti-skills sentiment that often exists around the tech sector. It is a world where services and tools are valued and prioritized ...
Listen to Your API Voice Not the API Noise
The entropy is high in the API world right now. I find it near impossible to read any “API news” right now because of the “disruption capture” that occurred across the API conversation. I firmly st...
Business and Politics Diminishing the Potential of APIs as the Next Iteration of the Web
The web from a technological vantage point was intriguing. HTML served up over HTTP using a client-server approach proved to have a number of beneficial use cases across different industries and l...
OpenAPI Intellisense Hints in a Simple API Governance Editor
I wanted to encourage my customers to take advantage of a simple API governance editor that I use in demos and workshops. I have my own more robust version seamlessly woven into API Evangelist and ...
Landscape Mapping Using OpenAPI and Kong
I am working with someone to map their API landscape, run various Spectral rules against, and produce a report and insights into the best approach to light up rules in pipelines based upon teams an...
Inline Guidance for OpenAPI Using a Simple API Governance Editor
One of the reasons I recommend my customers use a simple OpenAPI governance editor created by the Italian government is that it provides an opportunity to customize and make the linting of OpenAPI ...
A Simple API Governance Editor For OpenAPI and Spectral
Spectral rules have been the base of API governance since it evolved from Speccy in 2018, and is the widest adopted ruleset and linter. If you are just getting started with API governance and have ...
There Are So Many Things You Can Improve Around Your APIs Without Measuring
In a very binary world it is easy to just follow everyone’s lead with what seems like proven wisdom, moving forward and executing based upon what you’ve read and already know. It is easy to fall pr...
What Has Changed Since That First Blog Post on the API Economy in 2010
I have had the first blog post for API Evangelist from September of 2010 up for the last week pondering what my headspace was like in that moment, as well as what has changed. I would say the techn...
There Are Business Reasons APIs Were The Menu
The lack of business details in all the MCP vs API and MCP vs A2A discussions reveal the true intent of this artificial intelligence moment. One of the tells for me is how API, database, and file s...
Questioning APIs
I have spent a lot of time questioning APIs. It is what I do. Questioning and interrogating APIs is my way of pushing back on the machine. I have made a living doing this from inside the machine fo...
What API Documentation Comes With A Rating Mechanism for APIs?
I had someone from a large enterprise ask me about the opportunity around updating their documentation and including a rating for each API as part of the documentation. There are couple of streams ...
Why Would Meta Remove OEmbed Author Fields?
I regularly monitor the developer feeds of platforms to understand the technology, business, and politics of their work. One thing that caught my eye yesterday was the removal of oEmbed author_name...
API Simplicity Matters in this Moment
Arguing for the simplicity of HTTP APIs seems quaint in the face of so many different protocols in use for APIs as well as the artificial intelligence onslaught, however I would argue that it is ev...
Adopting MCP is a Bad Idea
I refuse to get on the hype train, and I regularly archive my rants on artificial intelligence before ever publishing them because I feel like I am screaming into the void. However, I am neck deep ...
A Baseline of Spectral Rules with Guidance Using Monaco Editor
I am a fan of Monaco Editor when it comes to editing OpenAPI and other artifacts used across the API lifecycle. While I natively use VSCode locally to do most of my editing, when it comes to guidan...
Using OpenAPI Overlays to Express Specialization Within Domains
I was learning about the role of service domain specialization in adopting the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN), and felt there is a significant opportunity to take the OpenAPI for BIAN...
Increasingly People’s Experience with APIs Are Only Using Internal APIs
For a number of years between 2010 and 2020 when people told stories about APIs, they almost always were talking about public APIs. Even when you talked about internal APIs, people assumed you were...
Adding Exceptions to API Governance Rules
One important aspect of successfully using API governance rules as part of the automated delivery of APIs using CI/CD pipelines is the ability to ask for an exception to the rule. Every rule, espec...
Why Generate OpenAPI When We Have Our Code Framework?
Code-first is still the dominant approach to producing an API in the etnerprise, in which more teams are coming up against the need to generate an OpenAPI artifact from their code, and asking, “why...
SDK Generation Pitfalls
I cannot go into the details of the work required to produce usable high quality software development kits (SDKs) for APIs, you’ll have to talk to APIMATIC, or any of the latest numerous other SDK ...
Response to the API Repository Proposal
Pavel Bodiachevskii posted a draft of his proposal for the API repository proposal, with accompanying blog post. I wanted to properly respond but it is of the length and quality that I’d prefer to ...
Where Good APIs Go Bad
I have done a lot of soul searching over the years to try and understand the line between a good API and a bad API. It can be hard to tell between the two, but somewhere along the way APIs we found...
What is it You Are Governing When You Say API Governance?
Like many aspects of our API operations when you say API governance it will mean different things to different people. So, it is always helpful to ensure that people are on the same page when it co...
The APIOps Cycles Canvas Creator
I was talking with Marjukka and Claire as part of regular discussions around governing API operations, and Marjukka shared their APIOps Cycles Canvas Creator–I have had it open and playing with it ...
Adding Governance Rules For APIOps Cycles Canvases
I was playing with the APIOps Cycles Canvas Creator, and published the ten possible canvases to the APIs.json for a demo product API. Next I want to lay the groundwork for governing the APIOPs Cycl...
Adding APIOps Cycles Canvases to the APIs.json Index for an API
I was playing with the APIOps Cycles Canvas Creator and wanted to prepare one of my demo APIs for a working session with Marjukka Niinioja and Claire Barrett next week. This is all part of my work ...
HTTP APIs and GraphQL, Event-Driven, and Model Control Protocol
It is easy to get caught up in any given moment of the API space, and much more difficult to keep yourself elevated above the space. It is lonely up in the tops of the peaks above the API space, an...
Editing JSON Schema in YAML
There are many little areas of friction I encounter while doing APIs that fascinate me as visible areas of separation between that classic line and often canyon between business and IT. But there a...
No More API Producers Only API Consumers
Like most APIs, Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps, and other APIs begin as pro-consumer and community, until they reach a critical mass, then the APIs themselves became the consumer, extracting as muc...
Consent APIs
In today’s extractive world of APIs being shifted into higher gear and looking like a Studio Ghibli scene all powered by artificial intelligence I wanted to spend some time learning from the world ...
API Specification Fragmentation and Rot
I’ve been resisting as much as I can to the recent waves of obsequious posts on Model Control Protocol (MCP) in recent weeks, inviting anyone to come talk about how the specification or any other s...
API Governance Rule Awareness Amongst Teams Matters
There is an automate and forget it mentality that exists around API governance rules today. It is another one of those confounded technical details that enterprise engineering and increasingly prod...
Happy To Talk About The Merits of Your New API Specification Anytime
I am nobody, but I have been around the block or two when it comes to API specifications. You are unlikely to agree with most of my views on API specifications, and there are folks out there who st...
API Evangelist Weekly Knowledge Builders Are Now Free and Available Via Email Newsletters
I have developed what I consider to be a base of knowledge organized into nine separate categories that I am pretty confident are what can improve enterprise API operations in useful ways. Taking w...
What Is A Valid OpenAPI?
Continuing to parse the great discussion from the weekly API Evangelist API Governance conversation yesterday, and building on the presentation from Sohaib Tariq of APIMATIC on validating OpenAPIs,...
The Venn diagram of API Governance and API Observability
Continuing to parse the great discussion from the weekly API Evangelist API Governance conversation yesterday, and building on the presentation from Paul Bruce on observability, I want to further p...
Applying Inference Models to Some of the Biggest API Challenges
My friends over at Corewood are cooking up interesting solutions to some of the biggest API challenges we face. But, I am going to need your help to verify not only what they are onto with their ap...
API Versioning Is Just An Engineering Coping Mechanism Amidst Unrealistic Business Deadlines
It is interesting to have studied API versioning all of these years. Every conference I produced and supported, the discussions around API versioning are always the most attended, heated, and engag...
API Governance Rules Provide a Secure Baseline to Start From
The weekly API governance conversation yesterday provided a wealth of insight that I will be looking to amplify as part of my storytelling on API Evangelist. I had ten people come by to discuss top...
An OpenAPI-Driven Pipeline Workflow From Yesterday’s API Governance Weekly
Continuing to parse the great discussion from the weekly API Evangelist API Governance conversation yesterday, and building on the presentation from Yarra Letz of Tyk on where to store our OpenAPIs...
OpenAPI Is Not the Thing
A lot of attention gets placed on OpenAPI as a final output, without much understanding of the importance of OpenAPI being more about everything that goes into its creation. A complete OpenAPI does...
Me Controlling the Protocol (MCP)
Time for an obsequious post on current trends to send signals that I still matter in the current conversation. MCP, or Model Context Protocol is the topic du jour for people wanting AI to replace a...
Evaluating the Default Redocly Rules
Last up in my series of evaluating the leading API governance rules formats is Redocly. Like APIMATIC, Redocly has organized their rules, making my post an easy copy / paste, but the work of still ...
API Governance Rules Are Not the Thing
Like OpenAPI not being the thing, API governance rules like Spectral, Vacuum, and APIMATIC, and Redocly tend to get all the attention when it comes to API governance. The rules matter as they can h...
This Thursday's Weekly API Governance Conversation
The agenda for this Thursday’s Weekly API Governance conversation has been set. Each week I am conducting an hour long discussion about API governance and inviting guests to come and drive discussi...
Theneo's Capabilities Image Speaks to the State of API Docs
I am always looking for the interesting bits being offered by the partners who fund API Evangelist. You know, the interesting things I can talk about and showcase while remaining faithful to the AP...
The Silence and Noise of APIs.json, OpenAPI, JSON Schema, Arazzo, and Spectral or Vacuum Rules
My friend Jason (JSON) Harmon said something very profound about the API governance rules space](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7306387751614988288/?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomm...
Evaluating the Default APIMATIC API Governance Rules
I am continuing to document the API governance rule landscape, beginning with Spectral, but then adding on Vacuum. Next I wanted to inventory what APIMATIC makes available–they have the most comple...
The Backwards OpenAPI World We Live In
I spent a lot of time trying to convince companies to create OpenAPIs for their APIs. I spent a lot of time discovering, harvesting, and evaluating the OpenAPIs for companies who create them. I als...
Rules, Pipelines, Observability and ??? For This Thursday Weekly API Governance Conversation
The first weekly API Evangelist API Governance Conversation was a success–you can tune into the discussion on Youtube, but for this week I wanted to introduce a little more structure, while keeping...
Roll Out API Governance Rules By Domain or Team in CI/CD Pipelines
As I continue to evaluate the potential standardization around the governance of HTTP APIs within CI/CD pipelines I am incorporating in several conversation around the phased rollout of API governa...
Expertise in Three Separate API Lanes
I have been collaborating with Claire Barret of APIsFirst and Marjukka Niinioja of Osaango on API consulting, partnership, and storytelling projects lately and I am really enjoying the balance they...
Don't Do Anything New — Just Map the APIs You Have
I am regularly caught off guard by the dissonance between the speed and velocity at all cost mode of some enterprises and the lack of discovery and observability of their HTTP API infrastructure. I...
Your OpenAPI is Your API Business Requirements
I spend a lot of time translating Word and PDF documents into machine-readable rules that can be used to validate an API during design, development, and build time. I’ve kind of given up on convinc...
When You Won’t Publish API Publicly But Freely Give Up API Intellectual Property Over To Cloud Services
Pushing back on making APIs available via a public portal is the top things I hear from enterprise leadership. Why would they want to just give away their road map and their digital resources to th...
The Spectrum of API Governance Rules
When you say the phrase “API governance rule” it will mean different things to different people. An API governance rule may or may not be precise and executable, and even when it is, that can mean ...
The Basic Building Blocks API Governance
The API Evangelist vision of API governance is a much more bottom tactical approach which can be aligned with enterprise business or engineering strategy, as well as centralized or federated approa...
Evaluating the Default Spectral API Governance Ruleset
To help me better understand the API governance rules I have developed over the last six months I wanted to walk through what API governance rules come default with Spectral. This is a critical hel...
Evaluating the Default Doctor and Vacuum API Governance Ruleset
Alongside evaluating the default ruleset that comes with Spectral I wanted to evaluate the default ruleset that comes with Vacuum. I am looking to do a diff between the rulesets, but also diff agai...
Establishing a Naming Convention for API Governance Rules
The first thing that comes to mind after evaluating the default rulesets for both Spectral as well as Vacuum, is that a naming convention for rules is needed. There is no consistency within each pr...
Reducing the API Governance Cognitive Load By Categorizing Vacuum Rules
It is a common mistake made by API governance teams once they learn the power of linting the OpenAPI contracts at design, develop, and build time within pipelines-—turning on all rules for all APIs...
Getting the Attention of Enterprise People to Help Them with Their APIs
Getting the attention of people who are doing APIs within enterprises is not easy. I would say that I do pretty well getting people to tune in for brief moments, but it is something that is more ar...
You’ve Been Put in Charge of Your Public API Presence and Experience
In an effort to capture another recent conversation I had with someone being tasked with API change at scale within their enterprise, I wanted to capture as much of what I shared in a story that ot...
Lack of Investment in API Discovery Drives API Redundancy and Inefficiencies
Responding to another excellent comment on the importance of having an API source of truth, as well as [providing a direct URL for how visibility and control is at odds with power and control])http...
API Visibility and Control Is at Odds With Enterprise Power and Control
I regularly leverage social media for engaging with my audience and customers, but I am also a big fan of keeping as much back within my domain as possible, while still engaging in conversation via...
AN API Evangelist Conversation With Derek Thompson of Ambassador About API Code Generation Using AI
Derek Thompson of Ambassador came by for a discussion about code generation and artificial intelligence. I had began engaging with Derek’s team about the importance of maintaining OpenAPI specs whi...
What API Tools Should I Be Running in My Pipelines for API Governance?
I am needing to answer a question for a customer regarding what they should be running in their CI/CD pipelines. It is a question I have to answer regularly, and I am always needing to refresh my m...
The Trailing Slash on API Paths and Why an API Governance Rule Matters to Business
I am working rule by rule to try and bridge the technical details of what we are governing with the business reasons why we want to invest in API governance. On deck is a common rule you come acros...
The Semantics of API Pipelines
After taking a fresh look at some of the tooling areas that I’d recommend running in API CI/CD pipelines, I wanted to draft an initial list of the different areas of consideration at the pipeline l...
The Importance of an API Source of Truth
Having a single place API producers can go to find everything for an API, as well as a single place API consumers can go to find everything for an API is important. Oftentimes this source of truth ...
The API Evangelist API Pipeline Builder
To help me better see the pipeline layer we use to deliver our APIs I retrofitted the API Evangelist API Platform Builder to only have specs and open-source tooling, and organized using some semant...
An API Evangelist Conversation With Marc Laventure of Scalar About Clients, Documentation, and OpenAPI
I sat down today with Marc Laventure of Scalar to talk about their API client and documentation offerings, and how they see OpenAPI as a specification. Marc’s taken a slightly different approach th...
When It Comes to APIs Our Enterprise Is Different
I hear this quite regularly from folks I talk to about API governance. That their enterprise organization is different. I get that, and it probably is in many ways, but when it comes to interfacing...
SDKs Are Hard — Look at APIMATIC to See the Journey
The SDK market is hot right now. If you look at the number of new services emerging and open-source tooling out there, one can conclude that the need for SDKs is blowing up. Clearly the API landsca...
Our API Governance is Staffed By 3 Fractional Employees Who Are Already Overworked
Rarely do you come across an API governance program that has the resources they need. Most of the teams we talk to are staffed by maybe 1 full time person, but usually are just a handful of individ...
Grounding Your API Governance With the Who, What, When, Where, Why of Rules
One of the most difficult things about producing APIs is getting everyone doing the work on the same page. This is why you have seen API guidelines emerge that provide a checklist of the things tha...
Do you have any blueprints for API design style guide?
I’ve been down the API style guide rabbit hole several times. A couple times drunk and a couple times sober. I ended up with a whole bunch of assumptions that I wanted to validate on the ground wit...
Writing the Code to Mock a FHIR Compliant Mental Health Record
The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) provides a standardized way to make healthcare records more interoperable across different healthcare providers. Healthcare interoperability is...
Welcoming Theneo as the API Evangelist Documentation Partner
I wanted to give a great big shout out to our newest partner Theneo. I only recently met the leadership of Theneo, but have been spending time over the last couple of weeks getting to know what the...
The Need for Collaboration, Discussion, and Yes, Even Disagreement in the API Space
One of the things that has made the API space so rich over the last fifteen years has been the discussion, collaboration, and even disagreement that has occurred between people. There used to be mo...
API Governance is About People Conducting Business
What is API governance? It is a topic I’ve explored from a technical, business, policy, and people perspective over and over for many years now, and my hope was renewed last week to hear that other...
Weekly Public API Governance Office Hours Each Thursday at 12:00 PM EST
I have been planning on adding weekly public office hours to help drive a discussion around the API governance needs of the community since the beginning of the year. I was struggling getting some ...
Tyk is Leading the API Governance Conversation
I opened up the Tyk LEAP 2.0 API Governance conference yesterday. It was a virtual conference but had the staying energy of a real conference. I opened up things at 9:30 AM my time, but then found ...
Hal and JSON-LD Hypermedia in the Wild With the CarAPI
Hypermedia is an API design pattern born out of the web and had its heyday between 2008 and 2014-ish, but received significant push back from API producers in the face of some very smart and well-m...
Capital G Governance and Lowercase g governance
The Tyk LEAP 2.0 API Governance conference yesterday brought together an interesting mix of people to talk about the heart of what API governance is—people and business, with a little tech sprawl m...
AI Makes Data More Accessible
One way people try to appeal to me in regards to artificial intelligence (AI) is by telling me it will make data more accessible. As the API Evangelist I am regularly advocating for companies, orga...
Prepping for a Discussion Around What Can Be Lost With AI-Generated API Code
I was having a lively debate on social media with the folks over at Ambassador about AI-Driven Boilerplate Code Automation, but in the context of API operations. We have a podcast recording schedul...
curl and APIs
I think a lot about a conversation I had with Daniel Sterberg, the creator and maintainer of curl a couple years back while at working at Postman. During our acquisition of all desirable talent pos...
API Evangelist Conversation With Juan Cruz Viotti of Sourcemeta About Schema Registries and More
Juan Cruz Viotti of Sourcemeta came by for a conversation about the schema registry solution he had recently built. Juan has gone deep into the JSON Schema rabbit hole, deeper than anyone else I’ve...
The Distribution of APIs, the Development, the Gateway, and the Governance (Guidance)
There are many ways teams producing APIs talk past each other. Is this an internal, 1st-party, or 3rd-party API, because what needs to be discussed will vary widely. Is this an existing API or a ne...
Learning From How Eleven Automobile Manufacturers Handle their Public API Presence
The previous example of how the credit card companies handled their public API presence provides a very strong industry for showcasing APIs in a heavily regulated space. Grownup APIs. Another inter...
Charging for API Access to Corporate Branding Images Like Mercedes-Benz
Many enterprises struggle with what digital resources and capabilities to make available via APIs. It always makes sense to start with digital resources that offer value, but don’t have high securi...
Allowing Developers to Bring Your APIs Home with Workspaces
HTTP APIs that operate in the cloud, but also APIs that are on-premise or are sandboxed all provide opportunities for developers to bring the value generated by APIs home to where they already work...
The Stories Not Told Through Your API Portal That Does Not Exist
Having conversations with business and engineering leadership regarding the availability of a public develop portal, API catalog, SDKs, and feedback loops is in the top five of the conversations th...
Schema Work is the Most Stabilizing API Work
Stop what you are doing for a moment. Close your eyes and think about how much schema is around you in your API work. Every API you produce and consume has a schema for the API, but also consumes s...
Making Your API Stories More Hands-On
Developers love to reverse engineer functional aspects of API operations, and they see code and artifacts as just puzzles. The best way to get technically minded folks engaged with your stories is ...
Consistently Putting Your Brand in the Names of Your APIs
Naming your APIs is hard. Having governance and guidance available for teams when producing APIs helps a lot. It can be difficult for teams, especially the engineering teams producing APIs to choos...
What Stands Out Across the APIs for the Seven Major Credit Card Companies
All of the major credit card companies provide a fairly strong set of case studies for how large enterprises should be doing HTTP APIs. All of the credit card companies have dedicated domains for t...
SourceMeta Schemas - A Simple JSON Schema Registry
Getting your schema house in order is one of the most important things you can do when it comes to API governance. Schema defines and validates our APIs, but also defines and validates our API oper...
Join API Evangelist for an API Governance Conversation This Thursday at Tyk’s Leap 2.0
I will be speaking at Tyk’s upcoming Leap 2.0 API Governance virtual conference this Thursday. API governance is top of mind for most enterprise organizations and quickly becoming a priority for th...
Corewood Fixes $7 Haircuts — aka Fixes Your Bad Code Generated by Artificial Intelligence
Kyle “Mickey” Mickey, DevOps & Platform Engineering Consultant over at Corewood DevOps, Platform, and Identity Services had a great common on one of his posts about AI. Stating that in the 1980...
Visualizing Your OpenAPI, API Requests, and Responses
A question came in yesterday about being able to visualize a rather large OpenAPI that was an industry standard. Visualizing API requests and responses, but also the surface area of an API and API ...
Make Sure You Upgrade That JSON Schema to the Latest Draft
Every enterprise organization in the world uses JSON Schema, and most have multiple versions of the specification in use, with teams largely unaware of the implications. JSON Schema is a specificat...
You See AI Agents but API Evangelist Just Sees API Discovery, Semantics, Hypermedia, Workflows, Automation, and Events
The official stance of API Evangelist on the AI hype is the same as it has been for fifteen years, and to never ever go too far down any single API application rabbit hole. Mobile application devel...
Welcoming APIMATIC as the API Evangelist SDK Partner
I wanted to give a big welcome to APIMATIC as a sponsor of API Evangelist. APIMATIC and API Evangelist began working together in 2014, and after a decade of working and storytelling together I am h...
Taking the API Pulse Across Industries
The API Pulse Schema All of the existing API industry reports available today collectively fall short in providing the balance needed to understand the state, health, and wellness of the API sp...
Having a Programmatic Enterprise API Resource and Capabilities Rolodex
Learning OpenAPI takes time and work. Producing robust and complete OpenAPI for an API takes time and work. Doing this across teams unlocks the power of having an enterprise rolodex of all your API...
Backfilling Everything API Management Did For HTTP APIs But For Event-Driven APIs
The next frontier of API investment will not be focused on artificial intelligence, but filling in everything enterprises take for granted (and often do not even use) with API gateways when it come...
API Evangelist Conversation With Frank Kilcommins About the OpenAPI Arazzo Specification
Frank Kilcommins of SmartBear came by to talk about the OpenAPI Arazzo specification. He shared the history how it came to be and how it is changing the conversation inside and outside the OpenAPI ...
A Quick API Governance Health Check With the Doctor After Changes to an OpenAPI
After making changes to any OpenAPI it helps to check in with the Doctor to make sure you haven’t broken anything. After some work the other day the good Doctor gave this OpenAPI an A+ grade. The d...
Vacuum API Governance Rules — All Spectral Properties Plus Id, category, and howToFix
When looking at the diff between the JSON Schema for Spectral rules and the JSON Schema for Vacuum rules, you learn that you have all of the same capabilities available in a Spectral rule, but with...
Siemens Has an API Sandpit
Words are everything. Most of the words we use in the API space are crafted and given to use by companies looking to sell us something. API Evangelist has made a career out of playing with and shif...
Graceful OpenAPI Property Degradation
As the 3.2 version of the OpenAPI specification picks up momentum (get your feedback in), it is a good time to evaluate one of the industrial-grade API capabilities that the libopenapi specificatio...
Each Appliance We Use Needs a Custom Electrical Plug
We like to compare APIs with electricity here at API Evangelist. It really is the best analogy to help business stakeholders understand the importance of API governance, and to show them how we are...
The OpenAPI Doctor’s Diagnosis is Tough But Worth It
We were working on a new API last night and before we got too far along in our work we wanted to run our design by the OpenAPI Doctor. The first diagnosis hurt a bit, and felt like the first visit ...
The Alibaba Cloud vs. The OpenAPI Doctor
We were working through the Alibaba Cloud APIs, profiling them as part of our wider work. After first glance the portal seems pretty busy, but once you begin working through it you realize how well...
libopenapi is the Most Important API Story You Can Read Today
Most technical folks do not understand API Evangelist rants about the technology, business, and politics of APIs. Most technologists live in the comfortable silo of technosolutionism and choose to ...
Make Sure You Protect Those API Resources In A Time of Artificial Intelligence
We are seeing an uptick in conversations around API service composition, monetization, and value exchange. This business side of API operations has been part of the narrative here on API Evangelist...
Cloudflare Uses OpenAPI to Standardize the Redaction of Audit Log Data at the API Gateway Layer
Cloudflare has a great story about how they handle API audit logging at the API gateway layer. It is a good read even if you aren’t a Cloudflare customer. What caught our attention was specifically...
The API Manifest Specification for Managing API Dependencies
We regularly try to do the work to stay in tune with the good work coming out of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). As part of this work we learned about the API manifest standards proposa...
How to Avoid Making API Governance a Bottleneck
It is easy for API governance to become the bottleneck in API operations, especially when an API review is a face-to-face gate that is required before someone can move their API beyond any developm...
Build Your Own API Client Around OpenAPI
There are more API clients out there now than you can shake a stick at. A recent article had 20 separate API clients dueling for your attention. API clients begin with allowing you to authenticate ...
OpenAI API on Azure is an Exclusive API License
The topic of API copyright was top of mind for most of the time between 2010 and 2020 due to the Oracle vs Google API copyright case. That was settled in early 2021 with APIs being copyrightable no...
Not Speaking JSON Schema Leads to API Drift
There are many aspects of API operations that API product managers probably shouldn’t be poking their head into. However, there are many aspects of API operations that would lead to better business...
API Governance: 10% Care, 60% Don’t Have Time, 30% Do Not Care
When you crunch the number of visits, engagement, and contribution across the self-service aspects of your API governance, and then you do the diff with the conversations and feedback at API govern...
API Scale, a Cautionary Tale
We are working with Visual Thinkery to produce some more images for API Evangelist. Visual Thinkery is behind the original API Evangelist logo that means everything to us, and is something that ref...
The OpenAPI Is Not What Matters the Most
A lot of attention is given to a finished and complete OpenAPI for any HTTP API. This is a good thing, but it is also equally important to focus attention on the importance of everything that goes ...
APIs Are a Door For Your Enterprise
If you’ve worked in a large enterprise you are very familiar with the physical security that exists, and that there are primary entrances you can take into a building. There may be a handful of eme...
The Nascar API Available As Swagger UI
API Evangelist has an automated crawler that searches for evidence of Swagger UI across the web. Most of these APIs wouldn’t rise to the level of needing a story and clearly are just a side hustle ...
API Evangelist Conversation About Trains, AI, Rich Fat Cats, Big Money, and Politics with Adron Hall
Adron Hall came by for a conversation about trains. Adron and I share a love of transit and trains, but also both make their living slinging APIs. Adron had recommended I read Nothing Like It in th...
Real-Time Vacuum Sealed API Governance Reports Over Time
There is a lot to explore under the hood of Vacuum as one works to understand how the open-source API governance linting library shifts API governance from 1st gear into 2nd gear, and appears at fi...
The Opportunity at the Intersection of API Rate Limits and Plans
One of the knowledge builders we are working on right now is focused on API service composition. We recently talked with Zuplo about their view of API rate limits and planning from the gateway pers...
Real-Time In-Motion Domain-Driven Design
We’ve encountered a lot of domain-driven design (DDD) sessions over the last fifteen years of our work. It is something few organizations have the time and resources to do, with even fewer who exec...
API Evangelist Conversation About Nothing Changing in the World of APIs With Jennifer Riggins
Tech storyteller and journalist Jennifer Riggins came by for a conversation after her post in The New Stack about why nothing has changed in the world of APIs for the last fifteen years. Jennifer a...
What are the Core Spectral API Governance Rule Functions
When it comes to governing the technical details of APIs as part of the design, development, and pipeline build processes, the open-source client and rules format Spectral has led the conversation ...
Take a Look at the Proposed OpenAPI 3.2 Tag Object
The OpenAPI tagging object is one of the most under utilized objects of the API specification, and one that when used, is something that can have a profoundly positive effect on API experiences ran...
Fifteen Years of API Specifications
The OpenAPI specification is the most important standard we have in the API space, because of what the specification describes, but more importantly it’s wide adoption and ability to get us API pro...
API Evangelist Tells Stories To Understand and Not Always To Support
We get some folks asking why we would share a post about an AI API from a company that is negatively impacting their world or sharing a link to the latest announcement from Facebook or Twitter API....
Will You or a Vendor Complete The Map of Your API Resources and Capabilities?
Mapping out the landscape of existing HTTP APIs across the enterprise is the number one challenge engineering leadership faces right now. In the race for the web, then for mobile, and now for API, ...
API Evangelist Conversation with Quobix from from Princess Beef Heavy Industries
Quobix from from Princess Beef Heavy Industries came by again, this time to talk about OpenAPI Doctor and libopenapi at it’s core. I knew “The Doctor” was a modular OpenAPI editor w/ governance bui...
API Evangelist Weekly API Governance Knowledge Builder Sessions
We spent the last part of 2024 breaking down what we’ve learned about API governance over the last five years (15 really), and the month of January workshopping the different ways in which we could...
The Verb in Noun API Button
The Run in Postman has had a profound effect on the API space, and is something we have long felt was in need of iteration and evolution. The concept is something that is wider and more universal t...
Please Put Spectral Into the OpenAPI Initiative SmartBear
I find myself reliving the anxiety from March of 2015 to October 2015 to November of 2015 regarding the behind the scenes negotiations to get Swagger put into the Linux Foundation on API Evangelist...
Grouping and Applying Spectral API Governance Rules Using Tags
One of the most important properties that Spectral does not possess is tagging. OpenAPI tags applied at the operational level allow for a simple yet powerful way to organize and group your API reso...
A Conversation With Daniel Kocot of codecentric AG About The Lines We Draw Around Our APIs Being Primarily About People
Daniel Kocot came by again to talk about the lines between our private and public APIs. We had been talking about internal, first-party, and third-party APIs back and forth on LinkedIn, and I recom...
You Don’t Have Enough Power to Aggregate That API Platform
The desire to centralize API gateways and platforms is a powerful one. Like mono vs micro, federated vs. centralized comes with its technical, business, but also peopel and political tradeoffs. The...
What Would An API Governance (Guidance) Rule Marketplace Look Like?
API Evangelist is really interested in elevating the API governance rule conversation, bringing more visibility and discussion to specific rules, and why you would want to apply and enforce a rule ...
The Great Unbundling of the API Client
We are doing a lot of stress testing on the technology, business, and politics of APIs, OpenAPI, collections, documentation, explorers, playgrounds, clients, SDKs, plugins, applications, and integr...
A Conversation with Adrian Machado From Zuplo About Technical and Business of API Rate Limits
Adrian Machado from Zuplo came by for a talk on API rate limiting, but not just the technical bits. Zuplo is doing a good job at bridging the business and technical aspects of rate limiting at the ...
Using OpenAPI to Configure Infrastructure Is API Governance
It is a tough sell to convince teams producing an API, as well as leadership for those teams, that API governance is an answer the chaos of noise that exists across API operations today. Applying S...
Talking OpenAPI, Parsers, SDKs, and AI with Vincent Biret, Microsoft Graph SDKs Principal Software Developer at Microsoft
We sat down with Vincent Biret, Microsoft Graph SDKs Principal Software Developer at Microsoft to talk about all things integration. We are very interested in the intersection of APIs, specificatio...
We Are Entering The Third API Documentation Renaissance
We recall vividly here at API Evangelist the response to Swagger and SwaggerUI when it came out. It was ground-breaking, game-changing, revolutionary, and all the other hollowed out phrases we use ...
APIs.json and OpenAPI for the DeepSeek AI API
What better way to spend the day than playing with the DeepSeek AI API. At first search there isn’t an OpenAPI or other artifacts for the API available so we got to work creating a single OpenAPI f...
API Evangelist Conversation with Dave Shanley About Why Vacuum Improves Upon Spectral
We have been wanting to sit down with Dave Shanley for a while now, but we needed to spend more time with Vaccuum to understand where it would fit into our world view of API governance. We finally ...
What is API Service Composition?
The concept of API service composition has been around for some time, but is one that hasn’t remained part of the dominant API narrative. API service composition is a concept that aligns well with ...
The API Evangelist API Engineering Platform Builder
The concept of a platform means many different things to many different people. API Evangelist has a pretty specific meaning when we say API platform, intentionally invoking a machine-readable arti...
Maximizing the Infrastructure You Already Are Using With APIs
If you are sitting there thinking that you could modernize and evolve legacy systems and processes used as part of API operations by introducing a new service or tool, API Evangelist always encoura...
How do I prepare my APIs for AI Agents?
A common question we hear from folks trying to make an impact with APIs within their enterprise is how do I prepare my APIs for use by AI agents. While there are some nuances to accommodating AI ag...
How do I prepare my API Operations for AI Agents?
A common question we hear from folks trying to make an impact at scale across their API operations is how to I prepare my API operations for use by AI agents. Our recommendations for making your AP...
How do I prepare my API Governance for AI Agents?
A common question we hear from folks trying to scale, mature, and make their API governance be more effective is about how to prepare API governance to be used by AI agents. Our recommendations for...
What is an API Product?
Words and phrases get tossed around in the API spaces regularly without much clarification, negotiation, and alignment on what they mean. As we engage with teams producing and consuming APIs we reg...
Snackable API Stories in the Moment But Also Providing Fuel For The Long Haul
API Evangelist is perpetually stuck in between the strategic and tactical while crafting stories for the API space. We have heeded warnings of wise architects like Gregor Hohpe and getting too comf...
Adyen Makes Good Use of OpenAPI Webhooks
Webhooks was introduced into the OpenAPI specification with the 3.1 release, and is something that isn’t always showcased as part of the core specification. Webhooks itself often gets overlooked as...
The Missing API Fundamentals
You can find endless information gathered profiling public APIs and the nuts and bolts of API governance via the API Evangelist website, but after much surveying and assessment of what API producer...
Making Things Smaller Does Not Always Mean Better
It is healthy to regularly explore and challenge our belief system in making things smaller and more modular and that doing so will make things easier and simpler. If you reduce something big to so...
Calculating the Governance Rules Coverage for an OpenAPI
There are a number of ways to evaluate the effectiveness of API governance. You see a lot of API scores, ratings, and grades. But, this approach places a heavy weight on the rules being applied hav...
Making Schema More Accessible to API Product Stakeholders
With the introduction of HTTP APIs into the enterprise, the concept of a schema has escaped from the world of databases, requiring more awareness and engagement across business stakeholders. Schema...
API Drift Occurs Because You Are Not Precise With Requirements
There is a lot of talk about API drift in the tech blogosphere and from API service providers. API drift is what occurs between the moment you craft the business requirements for an API to the mome...
The Properties of Spectral API Governance Rules
Spectral is a command line tool for linting OpenAPI and other schema for common patterns and anti-patterns. Spectral is configured using what are called Spectral rules organized into Spectral rules...
The Politics of the API Specification
The importance of open-source API specifications isn’t always easy to see as teams work to complete their sprints, and ensuring their Jira tickets meet the definition of done. The value of the nami...
Making Announcements About Individual API Property Changes
There are many things you can learn about producing APIs by studying the practices of other API producers. Understanding when you should write a blog post or make some other announcements will vary...
Valuable API Cycles Are Spent Other Tooling
When you work within the enterprise reaching out to other teams for alignment around API governance policies and rules, you tend to encounter a lot of pushback and redirection from teams who see yo...
Building Outside-In API Product Feedback Loops Through API Consumer Solidarity
A lot of attention gets spent talking about API producers doing “the right thing” when it comes to treating their APIs as products and cultivating feedback loops with their consumers. It is one of ...
You Have All The Power If You Know Where All The APIs Are
It can be difficult to convince people how important seeing and knowing where all the APIs within the enterprise are. When you talk about API discovery it often gets labeled as about developers loo...
What API Producers Want and What API Consumers Want
You can see the tussle between what API producers want and what API consumers want present in the API portals and experiences of leading public API producers, but this is a theater production that ...
Every API Should Have an OpenAPI, JSON Schema, and Interactive Documentation
We’ve done a lot of sifting through the details of how and why API producers provide documentation, OpenAPI, SDKs, and other resources this week. We’ve thought through the what API producers want a...
What To Do With That Last API Governance Effort Few Ever Used?
After spending time in the API space—-whether navigating the challenges of enterprises or startups—-you develop strategies for acknowledging failures and leveraging past efforts. Successful API pra...
Do We Invest In SDKs or Just an OpenAPI and API Documentation
We dedicated time recently to map out a high-level overview of what API producers offer to make onboarding and integration easier for API consumers. We analyzed the distribution and adoption of thi...
Api Evangelist Conversation With Reza Shafii Product Executive At Kong About Api Integrations Being Dead
My friend Emmanuel Paraskakis had tagged me in one of Reza’s posts on LinkedIn about API integrations being dead, so I invitied Reza to come over and explain more about what he meant. I knew the ti...
What is OpenAPI?
OpenAPI (formerly Swagger) is a specification for designing, documenting, and consuming RESTful APIs. It provides a standard, language-agnostic format that describes APIs, enabling both humans and ...
OpenAPI Powered API Sharing and Support
Postman, Bruno, and Insomnia collections are commonly used for both formal and ad hoc support of API consumers. In contrast, OpenAPI is often regarded as the source of truth for an API, serving as ...
An OpenAPI Powered API Explorer
API service provider Bump recently introduced an API explorer, and we’ve been evaluating its role within the broader ecosystem of API platform services, tooling, and the API specification landscape...
No More I, Just You, and We Are Here to Help
With the recent reboot of API Evangelist, and the release of 4.0 of the website, we are going back to using some of what we feel helped us successfully build the brand in the first place. Version 2...
API, OpenAPI, Collections, Docs, Explorer, Playground, SDKs, and Integrations
There was a healthy dose of déjà vu this last week at the intersection of static API documentation, interactive API documentation, clients as well as SDKs. We were already neck deep thinking and ...
Who API Evangelist Talks to About Enterprise API Change
There are many people involved with API change within the enterprise, but there is a classic persona of who knocks on the API Evangelist door or is recommended by someone who is familiar with what ...
Very Little Has Changed With APIs In The Last 15 years
API Evangelist has been talking with enterprise API leadership since 2010, and in the last fifteen years, very little has changed, aside from a focus on APIs as a product evolving, API governance b...
The Intersection of Static Docs, Interactive Docs, Explorer, and API Clients
The intersection of static API documentation, interactive API documentation, API explorers, and API clients is a fascinating neighborhood that we see ebb and flow with excitement, investment, and a...
The Desired State of Enterprise API People
People are the most costly, messy, and valuable asset an enterprise possesses, and enterprise leadership is extremely focused on keeping the talent they have and empowering them to do more work ove...
The Current State of the Business of Enterprise APIs
Almost everyone involved with APIs in the enterprise is focused exclusively on the direct monetization of API resources, with very few actually doing anything to standardize this work across all in...
The Current State of Enterprise Digital Resources
Your average enterprise organization has a sprawling and chaotic mix of application programming interfaces being produced and consumed, making business operations difficult to see, understand, and ...
The Current State of API Technology in the Enterprise
The current state of technology within these enterprises is almost always the same, with well-meaning and smart people working hard over the years to deliver what is needed within any given moment,...
The Current State of API People Across the Enterprise
The state of teams producing and consuming APIs across the enterprise is almost always fragmented, competitive, and political, and when this is the foundation for producing external APIs that power...
The Current State of API Operations and Applications
Despite the prevailing narrative of API reuse that exists across different types of applications, many organizations opted to choose new protocols and patterns to deliver what they need, and are st...
The Current Shared State of Enterprise API Collaboration
Despite the promise of connectivity and interoperability, technology and APIs have tended to separate us into ideological camps of business and engineering, by programming language, and any other t...
Striving for a Desired State of API Experience
Few in the enterprise care about APIs, but everyone cares about the experience of running the enterprise and its applications and integrations via a sub-optimal API experience, and enterprise leade...
Reaching for a More Desired Business State of API Operations
Enterprise API operations have to be sustainable and pay its way, and API Evangelist has always heard questions around how APIs can pay for themselves, but the bar is getting higher when it comes t...
A More Desired Technical State of API Operations
The enterprise leadership API Evangelist has been talking to is not asking a lot, they are just looking for some quick ways they can achieve, or at least get closer to a more desired technical stat...
Why Business Leadership Will Want You To Use The Latest Draft of JSON Schema
Explaining the nuts and bolts of API operations to business leadership takes some serious workshopping. Very few engineers, let alone business folks across the enterprise, will care about JSON Sche...
The API Evangelist 1505 Story Format
Back in the early days of API Evangelist we employed a simple rapid fire approach to storytelling that seemed to fit with the appetite of people who were seeking more information about the API life...
Questions to Ask When Looking At API Gateways - Can We See Your API?
One recurring paid service API Evangelist provides is helping enterprises decide which API gateway to choose from out of the multiple waves of solutions available today. Most API gateways have comm...
OpenAPI Doctor is What API Innovation Looks Like Today
It can be hard to find API innovation across the API space. There is a lot of reinventing the wheel and positioning about a future that doesn’t exist, with very little investment in rounding off th...
Where Do I Begin With API Governance - Mapping the Operational API Landscape
API governance begins with mapping the API landscape for the enterprise, but then should also occur for the operational landscape surrounding those existing APIs. A map of the operations surroundin...
Where Do I Begin With API Governance - Mapping the API Landscape
To answer the question of where to begin with API governance you have to start with mapping your API landscape. You simply cannot govern what you cannot see and talk to people about. The entire lan...
Where Do I Begin With API Governance - Mapping the API Experience Landscape
To close this series, you should have a solid understanding of what API experiences actually matter most. Every enterprise API program is struggling with having too few resources, and needing to do...
Where Do I Begin With API Governance - Mapping the API Policy Landscape
Now that we have the API, operational, people, landscape we can properly inform what API governance should be. The engineering and business platform should define what resources are available for t...
Where Do I Begin With API Governance - Mapping the API People Landscape
With an understanding of the API and operational landscape you must always map out the teams who are using any API being produced. Understanding the people and the tribes they belong to, as well ru...
Where Do I Begin With API Governance - Mapping the API Engineering Platform Landscape
This is where we move from the current state of where to start with API governance to beginning to shape what the future state will look like. This is about mapping out the engineering platform, re...
Where Do I Begin With API Governance - Mapping the API Business Platform Landscape
With an engineering platform helping teams producing APIs successfully being defined, let’s move on to the mapping of the API business platform landscape, and what the business properties of API op...
What is JSON Schema?
JSON Schema enables the confident and reliable use of the JSON data format, bringing consistency, validity, and interoperability to enterprise operations. JSON Schema defines the digital objects th...
Not Providing an OpenAPI for Your API Consumers
One of the steps of profiling any API for API Evangelist and inclusion in APIs.io involves searching for the name of the company plus Swagger, OpenAPI, and Postman. While profiling we are always lo...
API Success Requires Working Out in the Open
People assume API Evangelist is so prolific and performative out in the open on the web due to some sort of ego or narcissism, when in reality it is meant to demonstrate how you can achieve success...
The Internet Standards Work APIs Rely Upon That Does Not Always Get the Spotlight
After posting a sarcastic comment on people’s ability to be distracted by new technology instead of being aware of and doing the hard work to improve the ubiquitous and dominant HTTP API work on th...
The API Trainings to Help You Learn More About APIs
A common question we get at API Evangelist about APIs is where one can find training materials on APIs that are high quality. There are a wealth of programming language and technology specific aprp...
The API Reports to Help You Understand the World of APIs
There are a handful of very insightful reports on the API industry available today. While the cadence will vary, most of these API reports publish annually, tapping into their customers and communi...
The API Podcasts to Help You Learn More About APIs
Podcasts are a great way to learn about APIs from people who are producing and consuming APIs withn enterprises and startup organization. There are a number of podcasts available that augment exist...
The API Newsletters to Help You Learn More About APIs
Augmenting the list of blogs that can help you learn more about APIs, a few of those blogs have newsletters, but there are also a couple of stand alone newsletters that you can tune into on a regul...
The API Blogs to Help You Learn More About APIs
There are just a handful of blogs out there that we recommend for people to learn about the world of APIs from. There are a number of generic sources of information, but the stack of experienced, o...
High Entropy API Landing Pages
According to Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication for a message to be properly received the entropy needs to be low. Think of high entropy as when the board on the game show Wheel ...
API Evangelist Conversation with Ben Hutton of The Guild Software
Ben Hutton of the Guild came by to talk about his recent LinkedIn thread about APIs vs SDKs. The topic is an evergreen one that brings out all of the opinions and is something that I enjoy talking ...
3/4 of the Traffic on the Web Is API Traffic, Prioritize Accordingly
Version 4.0 API Evangelist is centered around a single narrative-—the governance of our HTTP APIs. According to Akamai, 83% of the web traffic are APIs, something Cloudflare puts at greater than 50...
The 2025 API Evangelist Vision
I was just exploring how I got here as well as where I am going, and I have only a few more process based posts left to publish here in 2024 before I move into demonstration mode during 2025. I am ...