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The shouts of the RESTafarians in 2010 still ring loud in my head. REST wasn’t just a philosophy, it was a religion. You needed to have read Roy Fielding’s dissertation and posses a strong handle on the four levels of REST maturity, otherwise you were doing IT WRONG!!! Folks rarely demonstrated what they were talking about, and almost always shamed you when you didn’t emulate what they were talking about in your work. Maybe I am just too sensitive, but it was this dogma that pushed me to s...

I love that when I post something as mundane as my coffee drinking on LinkedIn I can muster upwards of 50 reactions to it, but when I post something critical of artificial intelligence I get one or two. I regularly see folks chant that if you aren’t talking about AI, nobody will read it. I don’t give a shit about AI because it doesn’t benefit me in any way (currently). During the last AI wave I pretended to give a shit because I was dependent on being part of the mainstream API chorus. Whi...

I love the meta dimensions of my API work. I am profiling the OpenAPI for inclusion into the APIs.io search engine. To do this I create an APIs.json and add all of the properties of the OpenAI API operations to it. This includes things like getting started, docs, their OpenAPI, terms of service, and other common building blocks. After landing on the Read more →

My friend Allen Helton asked what I meant when I said, “APIs reduce everything to a transaction” on LinkedIn recently. He was curious whether I meant this conceptually or technically. To be honest, I mean both. I purposely leave it loosely defined, and wield it in many different ways. I do this simply to get people thinking about the nuance of digital transactions we often take for granted. I just want people to ask questions like Allen is doing, and pause from time to time to think about ...

I regularly come across APIs that I want to profile as part of my APIs.json “Artisanal” work, but I don’t always have time to actually profile the API with APIs.json and OpenAPI. So I created a bookmarklet that will take the title, description (any text I highlight on page), and URL and submit as new GitHub issue.

I have been immersed in the creation of APIs.json for many of the top APIs out there, including Twilio and Stripe. These APIs are held up as an example for how we should be doing APIs. I wanted to understand this more, so I spent a couple of weeks exploring the APIs.json, and Open...

I recently finished reading “How Infrastructure Works”, by Deb Chandra. It is a must read if you are doing APIs at scale today. She opens the book by talking about charismatic infrastructure like the Brooklyn Bridge or the St Louis Arch. These are grand collective public infrastructure projects that rise above, stand out, and have a personality all of their own. This look at physical infr...

I am not sure I am the right person to be asking for feedback on your startup. But, here we go.

My wife recently moved off of Substack. She was run off by their support of fascism on their platform, and was in real need of supporting her 1,300+ subscribers. I was impressed with her way of handling the research, planning, and ultimate migration of her newsletter operation, and found the pragmatic API story ther...

I am all about API governance these days. In my day job, and evening thoughts. I am no longer a cheerleader for all things APIs, unless they serve API governance. As I take all my observations of the universe of APIs over the last thirteen years and scrutinize them through my current lens I am left with a deep awareness that API governance is all about the limitation of speed. I love this title for a blog post because 98% of the people who read it will immediately assume that API governanc...

Providing useful API discovery solutions is hard. I have dedicated 15 years to understanding and trying to provide solutions to this problem. I regularly gather my thoughts on this subject and invest cycles in moving forward the solutions I feel are needed to help with API discovery. My solutions all revolve around my API discovery format—-APIs.json. As I move from ...

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...