Weekly API Evangelist Governance (Guidance)
Helping you make sense of the technology, business, policies, and people of APIs since 2010.
Last week we kicked things off with a breakdown of the what happens between API producer and consumer across the spectrum of experiences you might encounter via public or private API portals, landing pages, GitHub repos, and in the shadows of our web and mobile applications.
While crafting guidance for our knowledge bases, we wanted to have a firm recommendation on what the baseline expectations are for any public or private API—we didn’t want to take a stance without exploring the layers of API onboarding and integrations present in the APIs we are profiling.
API Sprawl, Chaos, and Losing the API Signal
The current state of enterprise digital resources, but also the operations and applications surrounding those resources are increasingly sprawling and chaotic, making for a very unpredictable enterprise digital supply chain, factory floor, and distribution channels for the enterprise.
What is more concerning though, is that people aren’t sharing and collaborating across the enterprise around the production of APIs, with multiple conversations this week focused on how to get people trusting each other more and actively sharing knowledge.
We talked with Reza Shafii from Kong about the death of API integrations. It was very sad news to hear. I guess we had a good run. Let’s all pause for a moment of silence.
API Evangelist produced more guidance to help teams map the engineering as well as the business platform landscape, with an emphasis on the human experiences to help not just bridge business and engineering, but making sure we are actually making people’s lives easier with API governance, and not just creating more work.
In addition to home field API Evangelist conversations we joined Treblle for their Anatomy of an API webinar to talk about API governance and product alignment.
All of these discussions reminded us this week that knowing where all the API are in your enterprise can give you greater power, but also that the ever shifting and competitive nature of enterprise operations can also leave teams wondering what to do with earlier API governance efforts that went dormant.
OpenAPI and Finding the API Signal
We found ourselves pondering what has changed in the last fifteen years of APIs, something that brought us back to the fundamentals of API and doing more work to educate what OpenAPI is and what it can do. OpenAPI is central to negotiating what API producers and API consumers want, and is central to powering API exploration, but also the human sharing and support that is needed across API operations.
A lot of time was spent this week understanding whether or not API producer should be investing in SDKs, or just an OpenAPI and documentation. This work landed us on pretty firm ground that EVERY API should have OpenAPI, JSON Schema, and your API documentation should ideally be interactive. What you deliver beyond that will depend on the awareness and relationship you have with your API consumers, and possessing the resources to deliver what they need.
Seeing APIs…
…But Also Having the Access and Control You Need Is Essential…
Several cycles were spent this week profiling all of the API service providers out there, looking for other ways in which the API signal is being chased by startups, setting the stage this week for a continued look at what API producers and API consumers want, but also what API service providers are looking to service and tell stories about.
To better understand what open-source tools are available for you to use in your work, and to better understand what API services are competing for your attention, we are working on a new API platform builder. Our goal is to help make the existing specifications, tools, and services we use more visible, so that we can begin to have more conversations about them, and how they work in concert (or not).
We hope your 2025 is off to an amazing start! It most definitely is here at API Evangelist. We feel like we are getting closer to having a finger on the pulse of what is happening in some of the same ways we did back in 2015. We are confident that this increased momentum will result in many useful stories and artifacts which when combined with these tools and services can help you accomplish more of what you are looking to get done this year with APIs.
If you need help with API governance, please let us know how we can help. And, if you are interested in sponsoring API Evangelist please review out sponsorship package, and drop us an email.