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 of a group or department within a company, organization, institution, or government agency. Others are still a side hustle, for very interesting resources or the organization behind makes it interesting, and make the harvesting story worthy. Once such Swagger UI is the one from Nascar, which comes up in a Google search, and stands out from the rest of the APIs in the following ways.
- Resources - The Nascar SwaggerUI provides a robust set of API resources.
- Portal - There is no primary developer portal to support the API in any way.
- Feed - The API is labelled a web api feed which shows the view of APIs inside.
- Signup - There is no signup or signal for keys, just publicly sharing the docs.
- Mentions - There are no other mentions of the API beyond competitive offerings.
A lot of folks in the API space love to shame Swagger UI as being out of date and ugly, and those who wield it are behind. For those of us who lived in that moment that holds true, but the functionality and ability to quickly publish documentation still can feel significant. The folks at Nascar represent many other enterprises in that they are doing APIs, but clearly haven’t gotten the memo about how to formally do them with portal, docs, SDKs, and other resources. This represents a huge opportunity to bring more awareness to the API potential at Nascar, but it also points to how enterprises continue to get business done with existing tooling and largely are able to ignore the mainstream messaging from us vendors and pundits.
