Weekly API Evangelist Governance (Guidance)
This is a special first for the API Evangelist newsletter because of our new sponsor and SDK partner APIMATIC. Thank you to APIMATIC for sponsoring API Evangelist, and if you are in need of SDKs for your APIs—APIMATIC is who you should be talking to. P.S. Their portals, governance, and API transformer are very useful too!
I was having a conversation with Claire Barrett of APIsFirst this week when she mentioned that “my” usage of “we” in the API Evangelist newsletter had seemed a bit off. I explained that this approach had elevated API Evangelist beyond just my personality in 2013, leaving many to believe it was a group of people who were behind the brand. She pointed out while that may have worked and been needed in 2013, in an era of AI human connection really matters. Straight to the point. I appreciate that.
When I shared this insight with my wife Audrey, she echoed that my usage of “I”, but also “we”, needed more refinement. However, her point was that I should always work to talk about the machine in generalized way, but use I, we, and you in the ways that matter most to all of us humans. I like this a lot. I will combine the advice from both Audrey and Claire into my work, and continue evolving my API Evangelist voice until I find one that hits as intended.
One area of API Evangelist I think needs to be in my voice is this weekly newsletter snapshot of the week. If you read anything from me, it should be this newsletter. This weekly recap is very much a human undertaking and is something that is meant to help filter out the noise of the week and bring you the signal that matters the most.
The existing spread of API industry reports available out there ca nleave quite a bit to be desired for the average API person trying to make sense of things. Gartner and Forrester speak to what IT purchasing leadership are needing, with the rest of the state of API industry reports coming from only the vendor perspective. To help fill the gap and attempt to take the pulse of the API industry from a human perspective, API Evangelist is launching the API Pulse-an API-first and design-first approach to taking the pulse of the API industry which is one that spans every other business sector.
Princess Beef Heavy Industries continues to dominate the API Evangelist narrative, with a quick API governance health check with the doctor after making some changes to an OpenAPI. It is easy to see how libopenapi can help enterprises get a handle on API sprawl by providing a programmatic rolodex of enterprise API resources and capabilities, which allows for the graceful degradation of OpenAPI properties over releases of the specification. For you to adequately govern APIs at scale it is important to have a handle on where things are headed with API governance and the difference between what Spectral and Vacuum rules offer.
Staying in the API specifications lane, I published a story about when developers see AI agents, API Evangelist just sees API discovery, semantics, hypermedia, workflows, automation, and events. While some investors and startups are distracted by the potential of artificial intelligence, I feel the meaningful forward movement and investment opportunity centers around backfilling everything API management did for HTTP APIs, but for this round it is all about event-driven APIs—we need things like analytics, rate limiting, monetization, and the other business capabilities we take for granted with HTTP API gateways.
My friend and API Evangelist Frank Kilcommins came by to talk about all of the amazing work he’s done with the Arazzo specification. This latest specification from the OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) allows us to stitch together many different API operations into a workflow that speaks to real world business outcomes.
Alongside the OpenAPI Overlays specification, the Arazzo specification is beginning to shift the OpenAPI community into a higher gear, energizing API service providers, as well as API providers. This portion of our collective API journey is where we begin to take those valuable digital resources we’ve been developing for the last 25 years and begin organizing them into more relevant and useful workflows.
You can catch me speaking at Tyk’s Leap 2.0 API Governance conference this week, where I will be focusing on the fundamentals of HTTP API governance. It will be a keynote version of what you can learn from the weekly API Governance Knowledge Builders that are held Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
With the launch of The API Pulse schema, everything about API Evangelist offerings is now a known known. Meaning, the core business of API Evangelist is now defined as 1) API Governance Knowledge Bases & Builders, 2) The API Pulse, 3) sponsorship by partners. The business model of partnerships is well established over fifteen years of operation, but the API governance knowledge bases & builders as well as The API Pulse are both new. I just have to do the work, keeping the drumbeat of API profiling, research, and storytelling moving forward. Everything here is part of my original vision articulated after leaving Bloomberg, and now I just need to stay the course until I achieve critical mass balanced across all three areas.
If you need API Evangelist to help out with API governance please let us know how we can help. A special thank you to APIMATIC for their support. And, if you are interested in sponsoring our work and site please review out sponsorship package, and drop me an email today.