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 reflects how we take pride in contrasting the enterprise landscape. When you engage with Bryan from Visual Thinkery he sits you down for one of his deep conversations to learn what your work is all about and then he produces whimsical hand-drawn images that reflect the stories which matter the most to you. Bryan is so good at listening and connecting the visual dots, but he also asks really great questions that get you sharing more of the depths and details of what you do.
One of the conversations we had with Visual Thinkery during this latest round of work was about the dangers of our obsessive belief in technological scale. API Evangelist regularly gets dismissed by pundits (agents) in the space as doing things that do not scale and thus won’t have an impact, despite there being repeated evidence of significant impact on the technology, business, policies, and people involved with producing APIs over the years. API Evangelist’s approach to schema, APIs, governance, operations, change, and evangelism will help you scale your enterprise operations but intentionally comes with visuals, stories, and even artifacts that will forcefully remind you of the humans being impacted by your technological vision.
The technology sector loves to remind you that the origin of our computer story began with Babbage and his difference engine. That is a management story about counting slaves and workers, extracting value from workers, and never actually delivering anything that “worked”. Where Babbage got much of his inspiration for the Difference Engines from was Jacquard’s Loom, which is a messy story of humans producing beautiful things who want to be fairly compensated for their work. I prefer an origin story beginning with Jacquard’s Loom with a janky repetitive player piano tune in the background as we work to categorize and seize control of indigenous people’s lands, count our slaves, exploit cheap imported labor, and line human beings up for shipping off to internment camps in WWII—all of this provides a more relevant and applicable narrative for the groundwork we are allowing to be laid with APIs today, and that are now scaling with AI.
The API Evangelist logo has gotten a lot of snickers and comments over the years at conferences and discussions within enterprise organizations. We enjoy this. It always is the canary in the coal mine for helping us understand who we are talking to. The API Evangelist branding is intentionally whimsical and very human against a very plain, orderly, and compliant enterprise background. The Algorotoscope photos we use daily on API Evangelist are meant to highlight bias on the Internet and reveal that the API acronym often just stands for abstracting people’s intersectionality (API), and the colorful hand-drawn imagery we employ unapologetically emphasizes that we are ALWAYS team human, and will always prioritize the stories of the humans producing, consuming, and being impacted by APIs. We are obsessed with APIs, but likely not for the same reasons you are, but along the way there are plenty of opportunities for our very human paths to cross and who knows, maybe we can learn something from each other, and tell a few good stories along the way.
