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 what I learned working at Postman and Bloomberg, as well as the last fifteen years as API Evangelist, I have created a base of knowledge that I want to share with people at all levels of the enterprise doing APIs. I launched these knowledge bases beginning in February and was charging a fee for the hourly classes I have been calling Knowledge Builders, and then consulting with companies to make the knowledge base available internally. Based upon feedback, I will be now breaking the knowledge bases into a twelve week newsletter that is supported by weekly office hour discussions to further support across these nine areas.
Tuesdays
- Schema - Laying the foundation for everything schema validating API operations.
- APIs - Doing the work to use OpenAPI to map the API landscape across teams.
- Governance - Leveraging API governance rules at design, develop, and build time.
Wednesdays
- HTTP - Ensuring that you have the basics when it comes to this essential building block.
- Service Composition - Leveraging service composition to maximize API value exchange.
- Proxies - Making sure you can always reverse engineer any API behind applications.
Thursdays
- Operations - Standardizing your API operations in centralized or federated ways.
- Changes - Understanding how to manage and communicate around API change.
- Evangelism - Make sure you are always communicating and telling stories about Apis.
While there are plenty of other areas you should be investing in when it comes to your APIs, I am confident that these are the fundamental areas all enterprises are lacking when it comes to doing APIs. Based upon conversations throughout February, it is clear that an email drip of knowledge supported by the weekly opportunity to engage deeper might be a more optimal approach to internalize the knowledge I have to offer in the hectic schedule of your average enterprise API producer or consumer. So, moving forward I am making the API Evangelist Knowledge Builders free to enterprise API producers and consumers, while working with API service providers to sponsor my work—keeping the knowledge accessible and free.
Each API Evangelist Knowledge Base and Builder has a registration form. This will get you added to the weekly office hours, and put you on my personalized list of 12 week newsletter recients for each topic. Knowledge builder office hours and email newsletter is sponsored as part of my ongoing working with API sponsors – currently Theneo and APIMATIC. Office hours are recorded each week and will vary in topic and focus, and each week you will receive a new email from me on each of the API Evangelist Knowledge Builder topics you sign up for, and are welcome to reply to emails asking more questions–which will be used to iterate upon the base of knowledge each quarter. I look forward to having you part of the conversation.
