Blog
When Steve asked me what we could do with APIs.io, I knew I wanted to improve upon what APIs.io v1 was as an API search, but I also lay the groundwork for what we need to help alleviate our API discovery pain. Every time I have made an investment in API discovery over the last decade, I also find myself considering what constitutes a good API, as well as a bad API, but also effectively dealing with the change that is inevitable across the API landscape. I knew...
Steve Willmott came to me asking what we should do with the APIs.io search engine. I don’t have much interest in developing tooling these days, but I am interested in hardening and moving forward our API discovery format APIs.json. Regardless, to really push forward APIs.json I need to push forward the concept of API discovery, and this is what APIs.io is all about. So, to help me move APIs.json forward I did a round of investme...
I used to believe there was a right way to do APIs. I don’t anymore. I know better. I’ve seen too many APIs. I’ve seen too many people get frustrated that we didn’t do the API in the right way. Anybody claiming to have the right way is selling you digital moose diarrhea. The right way to do an API is less about the API, and everything about the process, and who you have involved in producing and consuming the APIs. For technologists it is hard to see the process and the people and it is ea...
When I published my recent story about where API gateways might be going, I received pushback the most about my inclusion of code execution as a core platform capability. Which I would agree with in our grandfathers or even father’s API gateway realm, but in a gitops, serverless, edge, and programmable API gateway realty, I see things differently. I see a world where the API gateway is part of the fabric of the web. Our father’s API gateway ended up baked into the cloud, but the next gener...
According to Gartner, the full lifecycle API management quadrant is going away, but acknowledges in 2023 the API gateway continues to enjoy an outsized amount of focus when it comes to internal and public API operations. The gateway is important, and tends to be where attention is focused in good times and bad, but other stops along the API life cycle are also critical to the conversation as well, and I’m looking to understand more about why, while trying to understand where things might b...
You really can’t find a better example of APIs.json, then the one for Twilio. Twilio doesn’t have their own official APIs.json (yet), but I created one that I think really shows the strength of the API discovery format. I still have more work to do, but this Twilio APIs.json shows how the format can be used to index an API operation, while revealing individual human and machine readable properties of multiple APIs, as well as a common set of properties across all APIs–this version of my AP...
I need a master APIs.json for Amazon Web Services. I need an index of all the AWS APIs I depend on, and would like to have an index of the rest when I am ready to put to work. It is a daunting challenge to hand-craft an operational index of AWS, but I gotta start somewhere, so I headed over to the APIs.json Builder and added the name, description, and URL for the AWS developer portal.
The API gateway is the center of our universe when it comes to APIs. This is a reality operationally because when shit works or does not work, this is where the joy and pain is found. This is a reality because 99% of the stories we read on the tech blogosphere, hear from tech startups and analysts all tell us that the gateway matters. The modern API gateway was a carefully planned shift in power from your central database deep within your enterprise in the 1990s, externally via a service o...
One of the best things about writing on API Evangelist is I get to explore territory you don’t when working at an API service provider. There is no venture backed startup that will let me write a blog post telling you not to do APIs. I have contributed my fair share of mindless API cheer leading over the years, and can easily consider myself complicit in a lot of really bad APIs. Which leaves me thinking about why I did that API in the first place and feeling sad for the poor souls who are...
I am thinking a lot about all the ways in which APIs don’t just define our online world, but also our physical world. On Saturday mornings I normally go for a walk in Central Park to chase squirrels (with my dog), then I take the subway up to 106th & Broadway to pick up bagels for the week. This morning I had the 8th email from Geico telling me I needed to take my 2021 Kia Telluride for a “photo inspection”. On a day where I normally wouldn’t let my online self dictate my physical self...
I recently finished Democracy’s Data, The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them, and the book was the closest thing to capturing how I see the Application Programming Interface, or simply the API. I regularly get frustrated with my role in the API universe because of the conflicting force’s between not just API producer and consumer, but also the API service and tooling providers, and the investors w...
I have been thinking deeply about API workflows lately. Meaning, how do you chain API requests together in a certain order. There are many valuable API resources available out there that become even more valuable once you bundle them together. API workflows start with single APIs, maybe paginating through results or searching for results, then incrementally pulling detail pages. Then there are API workflows spanning multiple APIs where you can really start seeing the value of API interoper...
Everywhere I work I find myself reinventing the wheel when it comes to educational resources about APIs. There are many new topics to come along since I started in this game, but there are so many common building blocks you have to educate newcomers about-—we really should have a rich toolbox of content and other resources available for everyone to use at this point in the game. This is an area I dedicated API Evangelist to from 2010 through 2020, but I was just so busy trying to make a li...
I was fascinated with the rise of JavaScript as a ubiquitous but loose client-side programming language in our browser, but then also the introduction of it on the server-side with Node.js. I see a lot of parallels between the ubiquity and utility of JavaScript, and the ubiquity and utility of web APIs. I am equally fascinated by the rise of TypeScript in this fast and loose reality, bringing more discipline to the JavaScript programming realm. Using TypeScript as part of my work around Sp...
I have been talking about the expansion of needs when it comes to API operations, the lifecycle, and governance for a number of years now. I have been hearing it called the great unbundling of API management for a little while now, and while the word “unbundling” is appropriate, it represents an outsider, or market-driven view of what is needed. Unbundling refers to the separation of components from a suite of products the last generation of API service providers were selling you, so that ...
You hear the phrase API platform a lot from vendors across the API space. It is just one of many phrases in the world of APIs that is more a funhouse of mirrors than actually a meaningful set of words we depend upon. Everyone wants to be a platform. At first glance, an API platform is an API-first way for delivering and maintaining the applications a company, organization, institution, or government agency needs to conduct business daily. However, due to the way venture capital fueled star...
I started API Evangelist because people were telling me I was doing the REST API thing wrong, and being pretty shitty about it along the way. I don’t mind being corrected, but when the RESTafarians in 2010 were telling me I was doing APIs wrong and none of them were helping me learn the “right way”—-I wanted a way to push back in my own way. It is what made me spend the next decade helping guide people in a positive direction when it comes to doing APIs. While I am fully aware that I can a...
I enjoy how developing Spectral rules to govern an API slows us down to think about what matters. Really this is the biggest problem I see with people building APIs—-they are just moving too fast, and they refuse to slow down and think too deeply about things. I enjoy the frame rate in which Spectral rules attach themselves to the contracts we are producing for our APIs, and I figured I’d further expand on the opportunity to tell some stories around these machine-readable API policies we a...
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.
