One story I’ve told many times, but couldn’t find in my own historical archives of API Evangelist, is the origin story of API Evangelist itself. I am learning that the stories I’ve told over the years on API Evangelist provide a lot of context for my use of AI in my research, and filling in the gaps where AI stumbles is proving to be important.
API Evangelist began as an idea in July of 2010, and took form in the first series of blog posts published in September of 2010. At the time I lived in Eugene, OR, had just gotten together with my girlfriend and now wife Audrey Watters. I was looking to move on from a job as VP of Technology at an events management company who was running SAP and Google events in North America. APIs were something I had experience with and seemed interesting.
While running events I had begun to use AWS S3 and EC2 to help me manage the servers I needed for registration, emails, session scanning, and other common conference tasks. In the early days of AWS there weren’t a lot of applications and tools, so I got pretty skilled at working the kung fu I needed to stand up and tear down the servers I needed to support email blasts and the first day of a conference. When I took over the role I had to physically go pull servers out of a storage unit, drive them to the colo facility, and physically install the software I needed. I didn’t have a lot of room for scaling up and down as needed to meet the demand. The cloud changed that, and I saw APIs were a key part of the process.
In 2008 I was running registration for Google I/O, and it was the one where they first launched the Android phone. At the time it was literally a phone they manufactured, as well as the operating system, and every attendee got a phone. Google pushed us to build applications and integrations around their APIs, including Google Wave. Remember Google Wave? This opportunity gave me another chance to see the potential of developing with scrappy, lightweight XML or JSON APIs over HTTP. The need for data and other digital resources over iPhone and now Android lit the fire underneath me — seeing the potential for using HTTP APIs to do everything from the cloud to mobile, forever changing my life and career.
By 2009 I was ready to move on from the event space and began looking for jobs that were related to APIs. I took a brief job with Mimeo, a print company in NYC, and CityGrid, a city data provider in West Hollywood. I used this opportunity to learn more about operating public APIs and portals, and settled on the brand “API Evangelist”, emulating Guy Kawasaki and Jeff Barr, but with an exclusive focus on APIs. At the time I was programming, but I was a pretty insecure programmer with no classical training. So I focused on what I considered to be the business of APIs, instead of the technical details, hoping to build bridges with business stakeholders when it came to what mattered when doing public APIs. The concept of internal APIs wasn’t such a big thing, and was mostly dominated by the concept of service-oriented architecture. But public APIs were exploding with the introduction of Facebook and Twitter, as well as Twilio and Stripe.
At the same time my girlfriend Audrey was looking to establish herself as a writer, and chose to focus on Hack Education. She has her masters in folklore and storytelling, which provided the seed of inspiration for my focus on storytelling around APIs. Pausing to write this story, not a lot has changed. I’ve added the politics of APIs to the mix, and I’ve gotten much more confident in my technical chops when it comes to APIs. Storytelling is really the only thing that keeps me going with this work. I love listening to people’s stories about what they do with APIs, and I really enjoy sitting down to write stories about what I’ve heard and learned. I am thankful for the opportunity to publish 5000+ stories here, and the many, many, many conversations I’ve had with people doing interesting things with APIs over the years. It has been an amazing journey, and honestly I can’t see myself ever putting it down, and I hope I can keep it up until the day I step out of this world. I don’t see ever retiring from learning and telling stories about APIs.
