Weekly API Evangelist Governance (Guidance)
January 2025 was a very productive month for API Evangelist. To wrap up the month we published the first draft of our API Engineering Platform Builder. Most of the feedback we received was about the icons and it’s similarity to the API Days landscape report, but we will be taking in a different direction and using it to draw lines around our API operations—not just the technical bits, but also the process and people bits.
Drawing All of the API Lines
We had a compelling conversation with Daniel Kocot of codecentric AG in Germany about the lines we draw around our APIs and the applications that they power, which we feel reflects the realities of value exchange inside and outside the enterprise firewall. Over the next couple of weeks we will explore ways offsetting not having enough power to aggregate your API operations, and provide more recommendations for federating API governance.
Enforcing API Lines with Rules
The week began with a conversation with Dave Shanley about Vacuum rules, which has set into motion a bunch of work that we will release over the next couple of months, but also had us thinking about what an API governance (guidance) rules marketplace might look like. The categorization and organization of rules and rulesets in a marketplace could be delivered using Spectral rule tags. The conversations and work done this week around API governance rules led us to provide some unsolicited advice to SmartBear on the subject of putting the Spectral specification into the OpenAPI initiative.
Seeing And Staying Within the Lines
After reviewing many different API documentation tools this week, three separate open-source API documentation solutions clearly signaled for us that we are entering the third API documentation renaissance. As the API documentation experience advances, we also noticed that the API client experience has entered into an unbundling phase—let’s all rest our heads for a moment on the damage unbundling has caused to the API gateway landscape. ;-)
Lines That Cross Product and Engineering
Adrian Machado from Zuplo came by to talk about API rate limits, which quickly evolved into discussions around how planning of these technical details contributes to the product side of things and helps you establish a plan for how you might also monetize and generate revenue via your API consumption. Afterwards we worked to gather what some of the common properties of API service composition are, something that we will be releasing as a knowledge base on and conducting knowledge building session around in a couple of weeks.
API Consumer and AI Agent Demands
The topic of API consumer driven SDK generation using Microsoft came up during our conversation with Vincent Biret, Microsoft Graph SDKs Principal Software Developer at Microsoft. The Microsoft Kiota SDK generator puts an emphasis on empowering API consumers to generate code for only the API operations they need. We felt Vincent also had a concise argument for what AI integration with APIs while training LLMs as well as engaging via agents was actually about. This discussion triggered us to publish thoughts on preparing your APIs, as well as your API operations, and your API governance for AI agents to inform some ongoing private conversations we were having this week.
API Evangelist couldn’t help but throw in on the AI hustle this week with an APIs.json and OpenAPI for the DeepSeek API—resulting in being on the top of second page of Google results after only a couple of days. DeepSeek only have four API operations, which we published as separate OpenAPIs to help with automation. We selfishly contributed this work to get some SEO return (we don’t care about DeepSeek), as we still see organic searches as top traffic driver to our website by huge margins (search ain’t dead yet).
API Evangelist Knowledge Builders
We are rolling out our six new API Evangelist Knowledge Builders this week, which are dedicated weekly slots for delivering sessions tht target product or engineering folks to come learn more about the fundamental building blocks of API governance.
Schema - Covering what you need to define and validate API operations.
APIs - Understanding the fundamentals of producing and consuming APIs.
Governance - Looking at the current and future state of governing our APIs.
Operations - Expanding governance to the wider operations surrounding APIs.
Changes - Turning change into an asset rather than it being a liability.
Evangelism - Collaborating and communicating in real-time around APIs.
This covers all the areas that we feel pretty strongly that enterprises should have in place when it comes to managing their HTTP API inventory, which is likely 60-80% of their web and application traffic. We will offer these knowledge builder session each week at the same times, with each session priced at $169.00 USD per person.
We have teased a Wednesday slot which we will release in a week or two, but we wanted to roll out our line of essential 101 series before we moved onto any additional 101, 201, or 301 level knowledge bases and builder sessions. This represents one of the ways we will be monetizing API Evangelist alongside stories, conversations, and sponsorships for our partners, in order to sustain our work.
If you need API Evangelist to help out with API governance please let us know how we can help. And, if you are interested in sponsoring our work and site please review out sponsorship package, and drop us an email today.