Weekly API Evangelist Governance (Guidance)
Helping you make sense of the technology, business, policies, and people of APIs since 2010.
Welcome to the first edition of the API Evangelist Newsletter in 2025, and to version 4.0 of the API Evangelist website. Moving forward, there will be no more I on API Evangelist, just “you”, but don’t worry “we” are still here to help you. We are reverting back to using the elements of version 2.0 of API Evangelist that worked well. Our goal is to abstract away the personal opinions of Kin Lane (secret: they are still there), and employ a more compact storytelling approach that we call the 1505 story format, which we combine with a high volume and more consistent cadence, and support with artifacts that you can actually put to work governing your APIs.
API Evangelist has just one focus in 2025, and that is to help enterprises govern their HTTP APIs from the inside-out or the outside-in, you take your pick which will work best for your enterprise. Much of the fall 2024 storytelling on the blog was sharing behind the scenes processes and Kin’s opinions, but moving forward things will be much more about the technology, business, policy, and people of APIs, with Kin Lane fading into the background like Home Simpson into the shrubbery.
Where Do I Begin With Enterprise API Governance?
Knowing where to start with API governance is a daunting question to answer, so we put out a few stepping stones this week to help you get started. You should always begin your API governance journey by mapping the API landscape to understand the technical details, then you map out the API operations landscape to understand the business details, but make sure you also map out the people landscape. Without a strong grasp on what is really happening across the teams and tribes that occupy the enterprise API landscape, your API governance can easily run into trouble.
JSON Schema is Foundational to API Governance
One of the foundational concepts and specifications you will need to govern the enterprise API landscape is JSON Schema. This ubiquitous and often unseen specification literally defines and validates enterprise business operations. Ensuring that all business and engineering teams are aware and ideally proficient with JSON Schema is required for achieving the desired outcomes with API governance, and is something you will need to effectively communicate to enterprise business leadership. JSON Schema defines the structure, but also the reliability and trust of every digital object moving around the enterprise into the future.
API Documentation, Explorer, Playgrounds and Clients
There was a healthy dose of déjà vu this week at the intersection of static API documentation, interactive API documentation, clients, and SDKs. We were already neck deep thinking and writing about this intersection when Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti published the Seven-Action Documentation Model, and Bruno Pedro wrote about producer-oriented docs, which shaped our thinking at this intersection. Then Lorna Mitchell added guidance on saving edits to OpenAPI as an overlay, and Bump went and published their API Explorer. We will continue telling stories at this intersection throughout this week, further connecting the dots with what we talked about with Ben Hutton from The Guild on the Podcast this last Monday around SDKs.
Governance of Enterprise HTTP APIs
2025 is the year we all get to work on reducing our technical debt. 2025 is when we begin to do the work to get our schema house in order. And it is also the year where the bill for maintaining the API sprawl and chaos comes due. While there will still be a lot of speculation around AI applications leading the API conversation, there will be even more work being done by the people who are already responsible for the desktop, web, mobile, and device applications, as well as the many API integrations needed to power your average enterprise today. This is the year that API Evangelist will help you make sense of your private and public API presence, and begin to shape your API operations using standardized rules and policies that help govern the velocity, efficiency, and reliability of your business operations.
If you need help rolling out your API governance program please contact us today, and if you are interested in sponsoring API Evangelist please review out partner package, and we can talk more about how to best plug you in as part of our storytelling and guidance.