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Stories about the technology, business, policies, and people of APIs.
After talking with Lorna Mitchell about OpenAPI overlays the other day, and continuing work on my API Evangelist platform, I found myself thinking a lot about API experiences. Human experiences lik...
As the API universe continues to expand out of the business of APIs constraints that were applied to full lifecycle management, what some call unbundling, services, tooling, and specifications are ...
It is really difficult to distill down how to approach enterprise API operations, let alone the governance of API operations into a single bullied list. There are a lot of moving parts already in m...
Lorna Mitchell, OpenAPI Specification Maintainer with the OpenAPI Initiative, and overall API experience expert came by again, this time to talk about the intersection of OpenAPI extensions and exp...
After learning more about GitHub repository properties, policies, and rules, the overlap of the operational push of API governance occurring with APIs.json becomes more tangible. In coming years, i...
Claire Barrett, Digital strategist at APIsFirst came by to talk with me about the realities on the ground with APIs in large enterprises and the increasing chatter regarding the return on investmen...
To augment my how I got here post, I want to explore where I am going with the next fifteen years of API Evangelist. I have all the building blocks for the next portion of my API journey, I just ne...
I was just exploring how I got here as well as where I am going, and I have only a few more process based posts left to publish here in 2024 before I move into demonstration mode during 2025. I am ...
To help me understand where I am going I wanted to take a quick walk through how I got here, and spend some time geo locating myself as I enter into some conversations this week about what is next ...
The photos published alongside all of my blog posts look nothing like the other photos you see out there. They are distorted, noisy, and often fairly shocking in color and other visuals. This is by...
I recently sat down with Henry Calvert, Global Head of Future Networks at the GSMA about their Open Gateway suite of API for the telecommunications and mobile networking industry. They reached out ...
I am enjoying working with the Bruno API client. It was a nice reset in my toolbox. I recently have downgraded multiple areas of technological toolbox including ditching Lambda and serverless for a...
Lorna Mitchell, OpenAPI Specification Maintainer with the OpenAPI Initiative, and overall API experience expert came by again to educate me (us) on OpenAPI Overlays, helping contrast with the core ...
Authentication is always your first impression of an API, and for me where the storytelling about an API always should begin. I am a big believer that API stories should be hands-on and something a...
Asanka Abeysinghe, CTO at WSO2 came by for a conversation about the realities on the ground within enterprises when it comes to the platformication of all things, from Internet Developer Portals (I...
I have spent a lot of time thinking about the Twitter community over the years. I built my identity as the API Evangelist on Twitter, agitated through the formative years around how Twitter was lim...
I am struggling with how I communicate about what I do, and the value I bring to the table. My perspective of the API universe and what I offer aligns sometimes with the popular vendor narrative an...
The most destabilizing aspect of enterprise operations, and the greatest contributor to API governance efforts stumbling in my experience is an enterprise not having their schema house in order. Wi...
Augmenting my research yesterday into how many APIs does the average company have, I am working to answer how much does it cost to build an API. It is a very different but related question, with a ...
I am trying to put together a simple API calculator to try and articulate the real-world business cost of doing or not doing APIs. It is a difficult target to try and pin down because APIs are so h...
I want to add a new type of API to our lexicon. There is a lot of talk about zombie APIs that were stood up a long time ago to support a single application or integration but are no longer in use, ...
I am diving back into my work to profile government APIs, and had a friend inquire about the opportunities that exist in the cracks of government APIs, so I figure I’d try to load as much of it bac...
It is interesting to think of the different ways in which APIs are put to use and how some of those applications have a loud venture-backed bullhorn, while others do not. Mobile definitely possesse...
There are so many differences between the APIs out there. Even when they are HTTP, Web, or RESTful APIs. I know that people feel like APIs can just be automated and AI will take care of connecting ...
It is always one of the unrealistic lesser bullets in a job description for API governance roles, and will continue to be the greatest challenge for any of the service providers selling services to...
Having a dedicated developer portal for your company is a drum I have been beating for 15 years now. Some listen, most don’t, despite the huge amounts of evidence supporting the need. Amazon has Am...
I can’t articulate the importance of enterprise organizations getting their schema house in order as a starting point for API governance. There is an exponential amount of instability and friction ...
I am talking with folks about the different faces of API discovery, which for me, at the intersection of governance, lifecycle, and the platform from a producer and consumer perspective across inte...
I am profiling all three of the Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads API. This work involves producing an APIs.json that defines how they operate the business side of things, an OpenAPI that describes th...
It has been a decade since I first began playing around with the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) API. I first got a look at it while at Health and Human Services (HHS) while worki...
Getting people to care about APIs is hard work. It is something I will keep working on until the end of my career, pushing people to see and care about what is happening, but I will always admit it...
I hit a lot of “How to Draw An Owl” issues while profiling API operations for interesting APIs. These are often things that developers take for granted and just assume people will know about how to...
I just finished profiling the Open Policy Agent (OPA) API for APIs.io. I am working to profile as many different policy engines as I can to better understand how enterprises are standardizing aroun...
I am finding my stride profiling new APIs for APIs.io and I am settling in on the minimum viable repository structure for any API. To demonstrate what I am talking about I took HTTPStat, a simple A...
I am assembling a toolbox of API governance services for my customers based upon what I’ve been doing for the last year, but also based upon the needs of folks I am talking to right now. One of the...
I have many different business and engineering platform APIs I use to manage and automate my one man circus. As I continue the work to elevate the Bruno API client as a cornerstone of my API operat...
I have strong opinions about how we all make money in this space. Opinions that clash pretty regularly with the status quo, but when you sit down to better understand them, they are much more sane,...
As I continue my exploration of where and how we should be editing our OpenAPIs while also applying governance rules, I would be neglectful not to showcase the innovation coming out of APIMATIC at ...
I am working on my engineering platform definition this morning and working my way through all the commercial services and open-source tooling that I use to operate API Evangelist and APIs.io. I am...
I wanted to add one more point on top of my thinking about what is needed with an OpenAPI editor, as well as specifically what OpenAPI Doctor was doing with API governance rules, and talk about whe...
I have long been encouraging folks to rethink a visual editor for OpenAPI. I am NOT a front-end person, and I am very thankful for people who are. With that said I have very strong opinions and bel...
I am gathering my thoughts on what I’d like to see in an OpenAPI editor, and one of the interesting tools out there pushing the envelope is the OpenAPI Doctor. I mentioned them in the previous post...
After prescribing that my clients fire up a GitHub repository and begin centrally managing schema used across their OpenAPI definitions, I want to work on my guidance for helping them bundle and un...
There were stories told and work done on API Evangelist this week—I needed the distraction. However, this newsletter is about summarizing where my head is at each week, and this was a week dominate...
I am assembling a toolbox of API governance services for my customers based upon what I’ve been doing for the last year, but also based upon the needs of folks I am talking to right now. One of the...
It is fascinating how complex we can make things through us technologists overthinking things. One example of this is around the usage of $ref in OpenAPI, JSON Schema, and AsyncAPI. It is one are o...
I am finding more OpenAPIs being managed on GitHub than I ever have before. I learn so much studying different companies’ approaches to managing their API artifacts out in the open, and I think col...
I just wired up the GitHub search for my new API Evangelist platform, alongside Google and Bing—-all designed for helping me find evidence of any public APIs, but also across my private and partner...
I use the phrase “source of truth” a lot to describe the authoritative, centralized, up-to-date artifact and discussion surrounding APIs. I tend to consider APIs.json, OpenAPI, and JSON Schema arti...
I know enough about JSON Schema to know how much I do not know. I’ve hung out with people using JSON Schema on a daily basis who are completely unaware they are using a standardized schema, and I’v...
The number one thing I learned over the last year of getting hands-on with API governance is that it won’t be enough to govern APIs, because APIs are just the symptom of what flourishes inside the ...
It is a stance I have taken a lot of shit for working on the ground within enterprises, but one I feel is an important stance to take—using YAML in design/development time and JSON in the build/run...
I am a big fan of JSON Schema. I have a strong belief that JSON Schema is the most important specification for any enterprise, no matter which industry they operate in. I was talking with my friend...
I love the confidence that exists within the enterprise when it comes to knowing everything you need to produce an API, but also the simultaneous anxiety and lack of awareness regarding the externa...
I realize that it is hard to follow all of my work. That is fine. It is primarily for me to make sense of where I am going with this work, while also priming the pump for API governance conversatio...
API sprawl is the latest truth of the enterprise that API vendors are selling to, and us analysts and storytellers are spinning yarns around. APIs are everywhere!!! Littered across the web, the ent...
Greg Dennis who was on my team at Postman, and part of my master plan to spend as much VC money as I could on open source API technology, came by to share his expert view on the diff between HTTP A...
Us technologists excel at not seeing the human aspects of why things work—-we assume it is just the good technology driving everything. There is a reason we are good at coding in isolation. It is b...
I am revisiting the fundamentals of my API evangelism toolbox. My personal definition of what evangelism is, as well as algorithm shifts and evolves over time, and writing about it always helps me...
I crafted my own API versioning policies, rules, and guidance yesterday. As part of any API policy I craft I conduct research to understand what others are doing inside and outside the industry I o...
I am working with my kiddo on some API work while they are looking for a job after graduating from university, taking advantage of the free labor to help me search for and profile APIs. I enjoy thi...
I am working my way through each of the moving parts of my API governance for HTTP APIs, showcasing the policy, rules, and guidance I employ for each dimension. This work has two purposes, 1) it he...
My friend from Postman days Ian Mai came by to talk about addiction and impulse control with me. This isn’t your average API conversation, but neither is my podcast, and I am all about sharing my o...
The Monaco Editor from Microsoft is a great base for building any custom editor for managing API artifacts like OpenAPI, JSON Schema, Spectral Rules, and APIs.json. Monaco is the same editor used i...
While I applaud the CFPB’s recent finalizing of the 1033 rule requiring banks to use the FDX standard to make banking more interoperable and competitive, I think their choice of wording to talk abo...
When I am learning any new specification, I always look for the JSON Schema behind it. This essential artifact is your map to any schema or specification. It is the truth. It is what will validate ...
I’ve read rule 1033, and played around with the Financial Data Exchange (FDX) API, and I am working to expand my knowledge of what is happening around the financial API regulation coming out of the...
I am working my way through each of the moving parts of my API governance for HTTP APIs, showcasing the policy, rules, and guidance I employ for each dimension. This work has two purposes, 1) it he...
I recently sat down for a conversation with Luke Seelenbinder, Founder & CEO of Stadia Maps to talk about taking on Google Maps with a more sensible and affordable mapping solution. As I learne...
I am developing the experience filter for my Just-in-Time API Guidance kiosk, allowing teams who are producing or consuming APIs to filter API governance (guidance) rules by experience. To define m...
I read all of the 1033 when first released, something I will do again. I have requested access to FDX while running Open Technologies at Postman and reviewed the OpenAPI. However, as I work my way ...
I was happy to have Raymond Camden, Developer Advocate at Adobe come by for another conversation. Raymond was on Breaking Changes back in the day, and I’ve been a follower of his work for well over...
My name is Kin Lane — I am the guy who has been paying attention to the technology, business, policies, and people of APIs since 2010. I am best known for my API research, consulting, and storytell...
I have a new set of APIs and dashboard for editing APIs.json contracts, as well as individual APIs defined by OpenAPI. It will be a couple more months before it’s ready to share, but now that I can...
I am working on how to better communicate in a machine-readable way that an API is free to use. There is a lot taken for granted at this layer when technologists are looking to automate with APIs, ...
The opinionated and deeply knowledgeable driver of API specifications and VP of Developer Experience at Redocly, Lorna Mitchell came by to share some knowledge on Redocly CLI with me. I have made a...
Getting people to see APIs is hard. Even with the reality that each one of us individually makes thousands of API calls a day, and millions collectively as a business, almost nobody sees or really ...
I am working my way through each of the moving parts of my API governance for HTTP APIs, showcasing the policy, rules, and guidance I employ for each dimension. This work has two purposes, 1) it he...
I am a big fan of the mundane aspects of API operations. I love the day to day things it takes to make APIs work over the hype, big announcements, and over promising that tends to come with venture...
Subramanian Krishnan, or simply “Subu”, Architect and API Integration at Cloud Software Group within Citrix joined came by for an API Evangelist Conversation. Subu was one of the accumulated drivin...
Join Our Weekly API Governance Knowledge Bulding Sessions I am immersed in all the business and technical details of API reviews, and I want to continue working through my thoughts about what a...
Kin Lane, who is also known as the API Evangelist augments your API platform with Git-based API governance services that employ common open-source API specifications that help map and standardize t...
I love getting sucked down into standards rabbit holes. As long as I don’t get lost for many days it usually results in fruitful outcomes. I am working on my base structure that I will use across a...
Sue Smith, Senior Learning Experience Manager at Fastly came by to chat with me about the state of education in the tech sector. Sue has a genuine passion for education and can take just about any ...
As I talk to more mainstream customers privately, and engage with producers of APIs as part of my API Evangelist conversations, I am realizing just how tech focused my storytelling has been over th...
Your company produces valuable digital resources, data, content, and algorithms that other companies find useful, adds value to their business, and are willing to pay for. You can develop web, mobi...
An API contract represents a shared machine-readable understanding of the business and technical requirements established between the producer and consumers of programmatic interfaces used across d...
I am profiling hundreds of APIs each month as part of my APIs.io research, and I always learn a lot by reaching out to the API producers I am profiling. When you are in the business of selling your...
I have been trying to prioritize something AI related as part of my regular API work, but the closest I’ve come is using ChatGPT API for writing descriptions and summaries of APIs I am profiling fo...
I created a new API Commons base for Problem Details for HTTP APIs. The work is evolved from the Train Travel API template created by Bump.sh, but I wanted to isolate just the Problem Details for H...
I was asked the other day about whether to go with a multiple repository approach or a single repository approach for their API governance effort. This is a question with no right answers, and peop...
I am a fan of using GitHub issues to manage the feedback loop for APIs. Mostly because it keeps the provenance of what is happening alongside the API contracts. As I am profiling APIs for inclusion...
Bruno Vaz da Costa, API Architect (digital plumber) at RHI Magnesita came by to share what APIs means to his enterprise operating in the refractory industry, what their biggest challenges are, and ...
When it comes to reviewing your HTTP API, it can really help to bring in an outside perspective. While I feel that enterprise organizations should always be investing in their own API governance ca...
I have been working for the last couple of weeks on an API review service that I would like to offer to enterprises. The API review service is based upon the API profiling work I have been doing on...
I recently assembled a strategy from the 400+ Spectral rules I have developed. I wanted to abstract away these rules I am using to automate API governance using two separate layers. 1) Policies, wh...
I am endlessly fascinated with the belief that enterprise leadership has in Spectral rules, and the number of companies I’ve seen just turn on Spectral rules in their CI/CD pipelines and other auto...
I had a customer this morning asking another question I hear a lot-—where do you begin when mapping the existing API landscape within an enterprise. API sprawl is common, and it is rare for an orga...
This is one of my oldest API governance phrases, and my wife just reminded me after listening to API blah blah blah during a couple back to back calls, that I need to write a blog post titled—-Good...
I have two customers at mainstream companies asking the same question right now–where do you start with API governance? It is an important question, as well as a very difficult one to answer simply...
I use APIs.json to define the engineering API platform for APIs.io. The machine-readable definition of the engineering platform for APIs.io provides a definition of all of the services and tooling ...
It is Monday morning, and you are ready to get to work–do you know where all the digital resources and capabilities you need are from across the enterprise, as well as the ones outside the enterpri...
I am firing up the API Evangelist newsletter again. I switched services and decided to completely reboot my subscriber list from scratch with this new era. I had quite a list from before, but like ...
One of the biggest challenges I encounter using Spectral rules (and linting) is that it focuses primarily on what is wrong. I’ve seen enterprise after enterprise turn on many Spectral rules for tea...
Spectral has the ability to extend API governance rulesets by layering on the core default set that comes with additional layers. If you have a strategy for how you craft your rulesets, and a laye...
Creating Spectral rules to lint OpenAPI definitions is equal parts art and science. When you take any of the default rules or copy and paste some rules from the style guides of popular API producer...
One of the greatest challenges with API governance is aligning the product and engineering interests across every stage of the API lifecycle. API governance is heavily invested in from a engineerin...
I connected with Jamie Tanna on the API’s You Won’t Hate Slack channel, where I started subscribing to his blog. After reading his post on versioning, and more specifically why you should start the...
Bryan over at Postman asked me about the “rubric for comparing the different options” when it comes to linting OpenAPI artifacts in service of enterprise scale API governance. I have posted a list ...
One of the oldest tricks in my API storytelling playbook has been writing about competitors within an industry or sector of business and government. It is a tactic I used to obtain the attention th...
My friend Robert Buchanan came by to talk with me about the top mistakes people are making with APIs, and why people see APIs as just a technical thing. Robert gets the world of enterprise APis, th...
Dale McCrory, Software and Product Management Leader at Breeze Strategy came back to share his knowledge of API operations through the product manager lens. I am very interested in having product m...
When you are down in the weeds of API operations reading up on the latest technology trends and utilizing the latest API services and tooling, it is easy to feel like modern API operations are matu...
I keep coming across discussions around how we get more API product managers involved in the API lifecycle, and one thing that keeps coming up involves the creation of tooling that is accessible to...
A lot of attention is spent on breaking changes when it comes to the technical details involved with releasing new versions of our APIs, but recent conversations I’ve been having with folks have le...
I have been wanting to chat with Daniel Kocot for a while now, and finally found an opportunity to have him by for a conversation on API specifications. He has a very nuanced view of OpenAPI as wel...
I had my old partner in crime, Adam DuVander over for an API Evangelist Conversation. We immediately went back to the old ProgrammableWeb days and lamented that the blog and API directory is gone. ...
With his latest post API Complexity Is a Lie, How some businesses live off API complexity while others sell simplicity, Bruno Pedro nails a reality that perpetually weighs on me daily as part of my...
It is the top question I get–where do I go to learn about APIs? I’ve long had a list of the blogs, directories, podcasts, and other resources for learning about APIs–the trick is to keep it up to d...
I was joined by Sebastian Loch, Business Development at FatSecret for a conversation about how they have managed their nutrition data API since 2007. I connected with Sebastian as part of my profil...
I came across a post on LinkedIn from Alex Akimov, the CTO of Monite, sharing their strategy for versioning their API. I knew that I wanted to get Stanislav Zmiev, the Tech Lead of Platform Enginee...
I sat down and had a conversation with Pat Patterson, Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze. It was the first edition of my new podcast with someone other than me. ;-) Pat is an industry veteran,...
Join Our Weekly API Governance Knowledge Bulding Sessions I have been mulling over everything I found included in the five API governance job posts I came across the previous week. As I said, t...
Getting teams producing APIs to care about APIs is an equally daunting task of getting business leadership to care about and invest in APIs. This post overlaps heavily with my thoughts on what actu...
Getting enterprise leadership to care about APIs is the top challenge in the API universe. Everybody benefits with executive leadership mandates the prioritization of APIs, and invests in all stage...
Change is the great enemy of a successful API. There are many ways that change can erode the quality, performance, velocity, and trust with the APIs we have powering desktop, web, mobile, and artif...
I have cared about API specs over code for some time now. I have long invested in OpenAPI for defining the surface area of HTTP APIs, APIs.json for defining the surface area of API operations, JSON...
There is a lot of talk today about platforms. A topic that has evolved over the years, beginning with waves of startup technology platforms, and now followed by everyone thinking they are a platfor...
People don’t read documentation. People don’t have time to read books. But, I find people pretty receptive to absorbing API guidance in bite-size snackable chunks. My last book The API-First Transf...
JSON Schema is the most important API specification today. I’ll fight anyone on this. It is more important than OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, GraphQL, Protocol Buffers, and even my own APIs.json. Why? Because...
Adopting 3rd-party infrastructure, tooling, and services is an inevitable reality of API operations today. You will depend on 3rd-party infrastructure and services like GitHub, Postman, or Jira, an...
I’ve been researching, talking to people, and writing stories about API governance for a while. I’ve been working with OpenAPI for many years, and have been immersed in the creation of governance r...
Enterprises are interesting entities. I am very keen on understanding more about the how and why they operate, but I am also very keen at avoiding getting ground down by the churn of enterprise gea...
Augmenting a specs-only approach to API governance, I am continuing to invest in a GitOps-Driven API source of truth. I don’t care if it is GitHub, GitLab, or BitBucket, but Git is the core of your...
The gateway for moving towards an API contract focus with API Evangelist was the discovery of APIs and trying to figure out how to make APIs more visible to business stakeholders. API discovery is ...
There are fewer topics I’ve discussed more than the concept of the API lifecycle. I’ve worked for years to try and standardize how I tell stories about the API lifecycle, and have worked with numbe...
I have been working to understand REST, WebHooks, GraphQL, WebSockets, MQTT, Kafka, and gRPC side by side as protocols and patterns, but also as the specification that define them like OpenAPI, Asy...
The lack of business and technical alignment across API operations was the number one concern I heard across my 125+ guests doing my Breaking Changes podcast. In my experience, the lack of alignmen...
The next phase of API Evangelist will be defined by API contracts. The phrase API contracts has been thrown around loosely over the years to describe an OpenAPI definition, and used as part of a sp...
I have been looking to develop analogies for APIs that will make more sense to business folks. I’ve settled in on using what people already understand, the supply chain. But, instead of the raw phy...
I have used a lot of different analogies over my fifteen years as the API Evangelist, but moving forward you will hear me stick with the API factory floor to describe what we do with source control...
Completing our digital supply chain and factory floor API analogy, the last legs are the wholesale and retail distribution channels. Your API developer portal(s) are your wholesale distribution cha...
API conversations are hard. Not because APIs are hard, but because they are virtual and difficult to see, and there are multiple perspectives and scopes existing across individual APIs, and the API...
I wanted to take a moment to once again develop my understanding of why OpenAPI was successful. Some would argue that its success is unevenly distributed because of Swagger-—which is true. I would ...
One way I keep my finger on the pulse of API governance is studying the job postings out there in any given moment. I learn a lot from what companies are asking for via their job posts, while also ...
I am always fascinated by how us technologists can’t leave our backends out of API discussions. Keeping an API design conversation just about the interface between a producer and consumers proves t...
HTTP Web APIs are the dominant form of private and public APIs. It has been this way for over a decade, and will continue for some time to come. I know that GraphQL, gRPC, Kafka, and other API beli...
I have really, really, really missed the public conversations I was having on my Breaking Changes podcast, as well as the private conversations I’ve been having with enterprise folks across differe...
I have been studying the GitHub repositories of API producers who choose to manage their OpenAPIs via a public repository. I have broken down all the properties of these repositories to help me bet...
My friend Emmanuel Paraskakis recently published a list the top 7 Ways To Screw Up Your API Product-—which I agree with, but told him I’d ponder and add some of my to the list. From Emmanuel’s exp...
I was stuck in a cycle of thinking yesterday about the executability of an OpenAPI vs. Postman Collection. I am closely watching the Arrazzo spec for defining workflows, but I am very interested in...
I hear a lot of complaints from developers about the usage of YAML when it comes to defining APIs. I have a pretty strong design and develop time YAML, and build and run time JSON philosophy in my ...
It is loud down here amongst the APIs. It is hard to hear your own voice over the noise, and after you have many folks tell you that you can’t speak, or heavily edit you when you do speak, you begi...
Friday was my last day at Bloomberg. I learned what I had come there to learn and now it is time for me to get back to my API Evangelist work. Moving forward, I will be taking my previous API Evang...
I am perpetually fascinated by how people “see” APIs based upon their role, experience, and how they are incentivized to work on APIs. For the last decade plus, my strongest way of assessing where ...
I have been exploring the addition of a new property type to APIs.json called “Contract”. I wrote about recently how we need to expand our definition of the API contract beyond a technical contract...
I have found thirteen more solid examples of API providers using GitHub to manage their OpenAPI and related artifacts. I am regularly finding these as I am profiling APIs, and rather than just writ...
I hear this frequently about my APIs.json work-—it needs to scale. People struggle with understanding why I would hand-craft an APIs.json search index for other peoples APIs. Trust me, I sure wish ...
I am working on producing an APIs.json for the Train Travel API produced by Bump.sh. I am adding the API to the API Commons as a base API, and publishing an APIs.json is where it all starts. I will...
It was interesting to approach API search and discovery with a blank slate. When we got APis.io back, both APIs.json and API Commons were fairly dormant, and adoption has been minimal. Partly due t...
In recent years we’ve begun collectively using the phrase “API contract” to often describe the OpenAPI or AsyncAPI for our APIs. While I have been complicit in the adoption of this phrase, and supp...
While writing the story on Bump.sh’s adoption of APIs.json I stumbled across their story on replacing the ubiquitous PetStore OpenAPI that comes default with the Swagger and OpenAPI tooling of the ...
There are many ways your public API can be deficient. It is these areas I am mapping with APIs.json and looking to standardize with API Commons. The common building blocks of public API operations ...
Many of us pundits, analysts, and even practitioners in the API space believe in doing APIs the right way, or at least giving them the attention they deserve. This is commendable, but also the mino...
I was pleased to see the good folks over at Bump.sh have adopted APIs.json as the discovery format for their API documentation hubs. They have a nice write-up on how to Make your APIs Discoverable ...
I’ve learned a lot performing as the API Evangelist over the years. The landscape never fails me when it comes to revealing new lessons, and last year switching from Postman, an API service provide...
I have a custom built set of admin tools for APIs.io that help me quickly build APIs.json and OpenAPI indexes for search. While I am a believer in using AI, I am a skeptic of all the hype going on ...
My time at Postman came to such an abrupt end I haven’t had time to properly assess all the work I did during my time there. I just had brunch with my partner in crime LeTroy Gardner and his partne...
It takes time to properly craft an APIs.json for an API provider. It is something I wish API providers would do on their own, but in an effort to help jump start this I am profiling many of the top...
I am working to better define and shape when and how I apply both JSON Schema and Spectral rules. Both specifications are invaluable when it comes to API governance, and have significant overlap, b...
I have a lot of work to do profiling APIs using APIs.json. I am interested in producing as complete an accurate APIs.json for an API provider as I possibly can. When it comes to profiling providers...
As I begin to work on renewing one of my existing API projects, I wanted to sit back for an afternoon and assess where things are. I see APIs everywhere. I see them on my work to work powering my c...
While interviewing over a hundred people on my Breaking Changes podcast, the lack of alignment between business and technical groups while delivering and iterating upon APIs was the number one sour...
I hit a ceiling with my Artisanal APIs.json API profiling, in that I am pushing over a thousand individual APIs. It reminds me of running conferences, and once you get over 500 people, everything b...
Since the beginning of the specification, APIs.json has had an “apis” property as well as an “includes” properties, providing a way to immediately index your APIs, or “include” a reference to other...
I have long stated that I am focused on in the intersection of the technology, business, and politics of APIs with my storytelling. When I started API Evangelist I was fairly well versed in the tec...
I am like that kid in the Sixth Sense movies. But instead of dead people I just see APIs. When I see you, I don’t see a person. I see a bunch of API calls. To me, you are just the sum of all of the...
I am beginning to do work on what Steve and I have negotiated as the next generation of API Commons. As I do with most of my work, I’ll be doing it out in the open, working through my thoughts here...
As I profile more APIs for my APIs.json work, I keep coming across GitHub repositories that are dedicated to managing API providers OpenAPIs. I am gathering these along the way so that I can publis...
While profiling some of the top APIs for my APIs.json Artisanal work, which I am using to power APis.io, I have come across some interesting approaches to using GitHub for managing and publishing O...
I have been playing around with several iterations of what is next for the APIs.io search engine. I have a v2.0 of the search engine and supporting APIs.json index almost reading to replace the cur...
I am thinking a lot about the API producer and consumer experience. I am thinking a lot about the push and pull of our local development environments and cloud services and platforms. It isn’t just...
One of the super powers of APIs.json is the ability to evolve the human-readable aspects of API operations into machine-readable ones–as this is how we are going to scale to deliver the API economy...
I am pretty happy with manually searching Google and Bing for APIs across different spaces. The more APIs I add to my APIs.json index of APIs, the more words that appear as tags. So I regularly scr...
I am having fun pushing forward the APIs.json specification, while also building the next iteration of APis.io. The v1.0 of APIs.io is still powering the website right now, but I am exploring what ...
I like to take little side trips in my API profiling work for APIs.json and APIs.io. I am in the middle of profiling AWS, which is 300+ APIs, and taking some time to make way through all the moving...
I continued to automate the way I profile APIs while profiling the FactSet API this last week. I have been manually creating APIs.json overlays for the APIs.json, as well as OpenAPI so that I can c...
I am working my way through profiling many of the top APIs from Twilio and Stripe to AWS and Azure. If you’ve spent any time in these developer ecosystems you know there are a lot of APIs, and a lo...
I know a lot of folks think we are going to automate API consumption using AI. I am sure there are some layers of business and some APIs that will fit this profile. However, I know the API landscap...
I have been immersed in the profiling of the Twilio API, and as with most of my work, there are stories in the cracks of this profiling. Twilio maintains their own OpenAPI for their APIs, which I p...
Join Our Weekly API Governance Knowledge Bulding Sessions One thing I like about this blog format is that I can use the title, “What is API Governance”, over and over. Each blog post has the d...
As I was profiling the OpenAI API I noticed they had vendor extensions. This is a common thing I come across while profiling APIs, so I always make sure I spend some time evaluating the approach so...
I think I am settling in on what I want to be doing for the next 30+ years. I want to make APIs visible and tangible. I enjoy doing API reviews at Bloomberg and feel defining rules that help standa...
I am profiling APIs for APIs.io. I started with Twilio and Stripe, and working my way through many more. I am profiling their API operations using APIs.json, outlining their business approach to do...
I can’t stress enough the importance of providing well thought out and useful titles, summaries, descriptions, and tags for your APIs, taking full advantage of APIs.json and OpenAPI capabilities. I...
I profiled Stripe and Twilio using APIs.json recently. My API profiling process requires that I get to know an API, and while Stripe and Twilio do not maintain their own APIs.json index, they both ...
As I profile APIs for APIs.io using APIs.json, I break up OpenAPIs for providers along base path lines. I prefer distributed sprawl for my Artisanal APIs.json profiling work. I prefer my API repres...
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 o...
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...
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 ...
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 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 boo...
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 ...
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 t...
I am not sure I am the right person to be asking for feedback on your startup. But, here we go. Your startup will be successful. Not because you do the thing you sell to your customers, but becaus...
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 han...
I am spending two days this week with the Capital One DevExchange team outside of Washington DC, and they’ve provided me with a list of questions for one of our sessions, which they will be record...
