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 the sharp corners of our day to day existence. So when you come across someone doing the work it is important to call it out, and shine a light. A refreshing bit of work that helps make working with OpenAPI and Spectral more manageable can be found over at Princess B33f Heavy Industries with OpenAPI Doctor, but specifically their work on making things more visible.
- Visuals - Staring at the minutia of OpenAPI is mind numbing and the doctor is getting creative with the overall fonts and colors of working with APIs.
- Rules - The doctor is abstracting away the many, many, many, rules and making them visually more manageable and relevant to the work on the table.
- Explorer - I have long called for more tangible visibility of API infrastructure as well as requests and responses—-the OpenAPI Doctor explorer moves this needle.
If you haven’t already, head over to visit the OpenAPI doctor and play around a bit. Import your own OpenAPI if you need to bring things home. Work your way through the YAML view of your spec, the explore, ruleset, and doc, but then also click through the overview, objects, problems, and rules applied to the Train Travel, or your own OpenAPI — you won’t be sorry.
Visualizing and seeing APIs is some of the most important work that can happen right now. We are drowning in OpenAPI specs and we need help shaking the etch-a-sketch, and the visual presentation the doctor provides does this. But, the doctor also gets down to the real work of helping us see the inner workings of our digital resources and capabilities as represented using OpenAPI, but using Vaccum governance rules to see problems in a fresh light–seeing APIs is hard, and we appreciate the help doctor!
