Blog
While making my way around the API landscape for the last thirteen years I have seen that many of the words we use describe APIs are the same, but the meaning of these words will vary depending on who you are and the role you play in the great API hustle. I began this API journey like most, focused on the technology of APIs. I quickly learned that while technology plays an important role, the most important dimension of this great API hustle is more about the business of APIs. I find the b...
I have long considered Twitter to be one of the most important APIs to there. With its former status as the town square for the world, the Twitter API provided an unprecedented view into how our world works. Similarly the Reddit API provides the same unprecedented view into the “home page” for the web, revealing how the online, and even offline world works. The recent shifts towards monetization of the Twitter and Reddit API is a common strategy from the Silicon Valley API playbook, but it...
After flipping the page on yet another chapter in my career and beginning a new chapter focused on the application programming interface (APIs), I am left once again with the burning question — what do I do with API Evangelist? To help answer this question I will need to refresh my memory on why I did API Evangelist in the first place, what it ultimately has become, and exploring what value it might still bring to the table. I love to lean on the fact that API Evangelist first and foremost...
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a captivating and transformative field, capturing the imagination of individuals and industries alike. As I immerse myself in the world of AI, I feel, as many, awed by its potential to revolutionize the way we live and work.
I am not excited about recent evolutions in artificial intelligence (AI) as many others are, but as with APIs, I am looking to find and follow the story. This is something that takes regular studying and thinking about things, so here I aim spending my weekend thinking about all of this, trying to define where I stand, and speak somewhat intelligently about where things are going. As with most things tech, I am coming at this through the API lens, but since OpenAI, and most of the AI / ML ...
I just finished reading The People’s Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age by Robert MacDougal. It was fresh look at the early years of the telephone network, and how the technology has shaped this country, and this country shaped the technology. While it was primarily focused on the years 1890 to 1930, which was a very different time, you can draw several parallels t...
I was sharing my personal algorithm for how I approach evangelism. It isn’t very complex but is something I have evolved over the last decade plus and kept interesting through switching up the topics I focus on and which channels I use to engage with my audience. While there is a lot of nuances to how I personally approach as the API Evangelist or Chief Evangelist, it goes something like this.
I am neck deep in very philosophical debates around API specifications and testing right now, which I am working with my team get more precise in how we discuss API testing and avoid drowning in the semantics and perspectives that spin many of these conversations out. As always, I need to work through independently aspects of this conversation using storytelling, so that I can wrap my brain around the nuances and details of it all.
One of the things I love and hate about the API universe is that if you live by APIs, you will often times die by APIs, unless you can perpetually dial in just the right balance across how much value you generate, keep for yourself, or make accessible to others. I’ve fictionally written about how APIs are just the Sentinels from the Matrix, in that they first began as construction bots helping humanity, and then once the Matrix took control of humanity, their roles changed. Of course, this...
I heard a phrase this past week that when it comes to APIs—that we are all just swiping the credit card and then working to do accounting after the fact. So much truth. I would augment that state with the reality that we aren’t ever spending anytime budget planning. It is implied, but I think it is important to bring it front and center and balance out our belief we can accomplish everything we need with accounting after the fact. While I am no planner when it comes to my own APIs or my fi...
As folks turn their attention to artificial intelligence, productivity, and other distractions emerging across our technology dominated worlds, I am taking a moment to assess the areas that I feel confident are the most important API layers to be focusing on when it comes to the enterprise. Depending on your role within the enterprise, at a startup, within venture capital, or other performer in this Broadway musical we call the tech sector, you will see things differently. Even though I wo...
I keep working through my API contract testing discussions with folks. I wrote about getting pedantic when it comes to API contract testing last night to help me get a grasp on things, and I am working on a piece about change to augment this post, but as I was laying there last night thinking about all of this, I am realizing that folks see API contracts in the same way they see terms of service...
I am immersed in very detailed and pedantic discussions lately about API contract testing lately. Like many phrases in the world of APIs, the phrase contract testing gets thrown around a lot, without much understanding of what it means. I use it so often, and hear it so often, in so many different scenarios I lose track of what it means. Thankfully Kevin Swiber (@kevinswiber) is on my team and regularly gets all pedantic about it on calls, with...
I just finished reading the Empire Express by David Haward Bain. It took me a couple months as I read on the side and contrasted with other more nourishing reads from widely different universes. However, after finally finishing the 700+ pages I am left with many stories and tales to use in my regular work as the API Evangelist. I picked up the book to learn more about the regulation that went into not just this monumental “road Bbuilding”, but also laying of the telegraph lines across this...
One of the things I really like about Postman as a platform is that I really can go cheap on the user interface. I have several APIs in which I do not have any UI. I only need the data managed via API, and anytime I do need some sort of output for my storytelling, I use Postman visualizer to get what I need. One example of this in action is my
I was talking with Laurent Broudoux (@lbroudoux) and Yacine Kheddache (@YadaYac) over at Microcks this week. As I listened to them discuss the intersection of multiple API protocols like HTTP, gRPC, and Websockets, multiple specifications like OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, and Postman Collections, as well as multiple stops along the API Lifecycle like documentation, testing, and mo...
Human knowledge has naturally for centuries been captured in human friendly formats such as books, intended to be consumed by, you guessed it, humans. But our world has changed dramatically and we now live in a space where this needs to be shared with computers. Machine driven processing, learning, or intelligence requires access to human knowledge in digital formats. We have more or less completed the transition from paper into formats such a PDF, Word, Excel, HTML, but these are unstru...
I’ve heard this phrase seven times now from people on Twitter and LinkedIn-—that Elon Musk is just making a business decision to charge money for the Twitter API because it costs Twitter money. In the moment, with your narrow capitalist blinders on, this is a very logical argument. As someone who has been arguing that Twitter should be charging for their API for over a decade, this argument isn’t as sophisticated and logical those wielding it might think. I know this isn’t what you want to...
I am pissed about Twitter shutting down free access to their API. It genuinely breaks my heart. I’ve seen many people who do not quite grok how I feel, so as I do with any topic, I am looking to do some storytelling around the subject. After diving in for a day, I can tell this isn’t going to be something I can make sense of in a single post, and predict there will be several essays required, and honestly, I am feeling like I want to get into book mode on this subject. Seriously, I am not ...
I am corresponding back and forth with what I will call an open source and API standards therapist for now, helping me make sense of the ocean of API standards I am drowning in and assisting me in finding a way forward with. In my personal style, I need to write my way forward, processing what they have been sharing, and try to find ways I can take meaningful steps forward.At the scale and scope in which I operate in, it is a daily challenge for me to not be overwhelmed by what is happenin...
I have been making a number of Postman collections to help automate and scale my new Mastodon universe, and when I share them I get one of two responses: 1) these are awesome and I’ll be putting them to use, and 2) these appear to be awesome but I have no idea what they are and how they work. Once again helping me realize that you are either in the know about APIs (and Postman), or you aren’t. Those of us in t...
Everything in this world seems to occur in cycles, with many patterns I’ve wrestled with years ago coming around again. In 2014, in the heart of the Oracle vs. Google, me and my partner in crime Steve Willmott created the API Commons and APIs.json to help us make sense of the sprawling API landscape we saw emerging. I’ll dive into what each of these projects were shortly, but in short, they are machine-readable open so...
Good API trends can linger on for some time, but as with the decline of monolith, many love to anticipate the death of microservices through strangulation by its own distributed weight. While event-driven, circuit-breakers, GraphQL, and other leading patterns will continue to help us orchestrate successfully across this chaos, there are some other elements of our API operations that will be shaping what the API landscape looks like in the coming years.
As I work to rebuild my social presence via Mastodon, I am reminded of how I built API Evangelist using Twitter and my blogs between 2010 and 2020. I am very invested in API platforms these days, and API blah blah blah that will attract the attention of enterprise organizations. So I tend to tell stories about things like API collaboration, automation, and governance, and things that API producers care about. As I do the work each week to slowly build my Mastodon community for my API Evang...
This is a short story about metadata (I have to assume at this point you can read). About why a data file or dataset on its own is inadequate for analysis or research, and therefore insufficient to draw conclusive evidence or make informed decisions. Why you should never publish data or make it available through an API without its documentation. And, being mindful that computer applications are the immediate data consumers, emphasize the importance of machine actionable metadata. Here is a...
