Rules

Rules are policies made machine-readable — the point where “we agreed to do this” becomes “the pipeline checks that we did.” I have spent years on API governance tooling, and this is where governance either becomes real or stays aspirational forever.

I help you craft the rules that govern the technical details of your APIs and the wider operations around them — linting rules, design rules, security checks, the machine-enforceable version of your policies. I lean on tools like Spectral and a Git-driven, standards-based approach, and I deliberately keep you independent of any single vendor's runtime. The rules are yours; they should outlive any tool you happen to run them in.

The method is the same one behind the free API Commons rule tooling I build in the open: Spectral Ruleset Studio turns a style guide into an owned, grounded ruleset, Ruleset Commons lets you adopt a provenanced ruleset by reference, the Spectral OWASP Ruleset adds a security layer, and the API Validator runs them all. You can start there for free and keep whatever you build.

The aim is governance that runs quietly in the background, catching drift before it ships, without a human having to police everything by hand.

What you walk away with

• Machine-readable rulesets tied directly back to your policies
• Enforcement wired into your pipelines so it runs on every change
• Rules that stay portable across tools and vendors

Related reading

• Spectral Rules: Machine-Readable Enforcement
• Govern in the IDE, Where the Work Happens
• The API Governance Rule is Just a Representation of What Matters
• The State of Spectral in API Pipelines (paper)
• Spectral Ruleset Studio — turn a style guide into an owned, grounded ruleset
• Ruleset Commons — adopt a provenanced ruleset by reference
• Spectral OWASP Ruleset — a security layer for your rules
• API Validator — run your rules in the browser