Weekly API Evangelist Governance (Guidance)
Let’s give a big Monday shout out to our documentation partner Theneo and our SDK partner APIMATIC. API Evangelist storytelling occurs because of Theneo and APIMATIC, and I am thankful to have their support for this exciting ride!
The week began with nose to the grindstone improving the capabilities of the API Evangelist OpenAPI linter, building on my base set of Spectral rules with highlighting, guidance, and other support. In absence of direct tooling support in Spectral, I am exploring ways that one can add exceptions to API governance rules at design time using Monaco Editor, but also at build time in pipelines—this is an important capabilities, but challenge to implement without tooling support.
Responding to folks I work with inside enterprise organizations I pointed to an example of you could use OpenAPI Overlays to express specialization within industry domains or different domains within the enterprise. Additionally, as I was supporting someone who was looking to reboot their enterprise API documentation I provided three examples of how API documentation solutions are converging with the ability to rate the API documentation using Spectral rules.
It is difficult to open up LinkedIn these days and not get bombarded with everything MCP in service of AI. I struggle to understand why people think jumping on a new open-source specification proposed by one of the leaders on the hype train makes sense—but y’all do you. Everyone in the API space is enamored with the spec, without any self-reflection about the current specifications in use, as well as the last couple of specifications also presented by leading startups during a trend tha have ultimately gone away.
The isolation of technologists within the venture-backed echo chamber exclusively focus on AI, combined with the reality that increasingly people’s experience with APIs are only using internal APIs makes for a pretty lucrative flywheel for startups and investors to get at enterprise data. When you combine this with a complete absence of business alignment within enterprises for all this new vision for APIs it reveals what this wave of technology is all about for me, but it is something that that seems to elude and confound others in the game.
The entropy levels are unsustainably high in the tech sector right now. There is a lot of money to be made in the chaos and confusion as the machine continues to abstract away the humans—-as Facebook did this week by removing the oEmbed authorship fields for all videos and posts. As things get noisier I am reminded that API simplicity is what will matter most in this moment, and I feel stronger than ever that I can’t let myself be distracted by the noise within the machine.
I’ll be removing myself from the echo chamber and stepping outside of those big Silicon doors of the machine for a while to get a bit to get a bit of fresh air—I just can’t breathe from all the toxic fumes produced by AI right now.
If you need API Evangelist to help out with API governance please let us know how we can help. And thank you again to APIMATIC and Theneo for their continued support. If you are interested in sponsoring our work and site please review out sponsorship package, and drop me an email today.