Supreet Nagi recently sent me his new handbook, From Chaos to Connectivity: The API Practitioner’s Handbook. I read it when it sent it to me, but it keeps coming up in my work as something I needed to revisit. Thirty pages, a tight narrative arc, three recurring personas, and a single metaphor carried all the way through: your enterprise’s API estate is either a jungle or a highway, and you get to choose which. I’ve been writing about API governance for fifteen years. I’ve watched the phrase “API-first” go from fringe to cliché to something enterprises put on slides without meaning it. Supreet’s self-published handbook is the clearest articulation I’ve read in a while of why most of those slides never turned into working governance, and what a real alternative looks like. The Jungle Everyone Pretends Not to Have Supreet opens with a diagnosis that will read as uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has actually worked inside a large enterprise: the APIs are everywhere, nobody knows where they are, and the people whose job is to know can’t keep up. He calls it the API Jungle. Four services named Payments, New_Payments, Payments_v2_final, and BillingSvc, none of them documented, two of them owned by teams that no longer exist. A developer named Ada spends three hours on digital archaeology, gives up, and writes a fifth one — which joins the jungle. That story has been true at every company I’ve worked with. The details change. The shape does not. I’ve been at this for 15 years. Same story. I like how Supreet refuses to treat this as a purely technical problem. He names the human cost directly through three personas, Ada the developer, Alex the consumer, Iris the inspector — and walks each of them through the workflow that produces their specific flavor of frustration. Ada contributes to sprawl because finding a trustworthy existing service is harder than building a new one. Alex’s project slips two weeks because the API he was promised doesn’t exist in the way he was told. Iris is a cartographer with pen and paper, auditing a landscape that’s shifting faster than she can draw it. Supreet’s approach reflects why I am using more personas in my work. None of these people are doing anything wrong. The system they’re in produces these outcomes regardless of individual effort. That’s the observation that matters. Why the Architecture Review Board breaks The root cause Supreet identifies is specific and correct: the Architecture Review Board model. A central committee that meets every other Tuesday to approve new APIs. On paper this ensures quality. In practice it ensures that teams with real deadlines route around it, and the routes they take become Shadow APIs — services built deliberately off the books because the official process would destroy the project timeline. The governance model designed to create order ends up producing chaos, because it forces developers to work around it to get anything done. Once you see it named this clearly, you can’t…