Weekly API Evangelist Governance (Guidance)
Let’s kick things off this week with a 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!
Focusing on the higher levels of strategy and operations for enterprise operations this week I provided more assistance for those who have been put in charge of the enterprise public API presence and experience. It is hard to know where to begin with this work, and I was looking to help clients understand that their enterprise can be differe, but are likely also very similar to other enterprises—helping teams make more sense of why API visibility and control is often at odds with power and control within the enterprise. To help persuade enterprise leadership of why APIs matter, I spent time this week talking about how a lack of investment in API discovery can drive API redundancy and inefficiencies.
Most API governance efforts are staffed by a handful of employees who are only able to give a fractional amount of their already overworked day. API governance is all about people who are conducting business, and you will find that you can get more traction when you ground your API governance with the who, what, when, where, and why of governance rules. Work with customers on API governance rules this week led to me re-evaluate the role that API style guides play in API governance, and whether or not style guides are still the best way to approach organizing and communicating what API governance is about.
Time was spent this week taking a fresh look at what API tools we should be running in our API pipelines in service of API governance. I begin with stories of how important it is to have a source of truth for each API, but then were also evaluating what the semantics of our API pipelines might be in support of governing this source of truth for our APIs. To help support discussion we retrofitted our API Engineering Platform Builder to help us define what specifications and tooling can be running within our CI/CD pipelines. The goal is to be able to establish a consistent framework for not just enforcing but a focus on guiding teams with API governance.
There were two API Evangelist podcasts this week, one with Marc Laventure about OpenAPI and API clients, and another about server side code generation using AI with Ambassador. The conversation with Derek Thompson from Ambassador had us thinking deeply about how hard it is to generate SDKs, and the current wave of SDK generation startups to emerge on the scene. I’ll be continuing to explore this critical aspect of API operations this week as we explore how our SDLK partner APMATIC uses AI. Our goal is to not be hyping AI, but bringing things back down to reality with out ML and AI can sensibly apply to each area of API operations.
If you want to join in on the discussion you can join in on the weekly Knowledge Builder sessions, but I am also introducing weekly API governance discussions that are free and open to the public each Thursday at 12:00 PM Eastern. The agenda for the weekly API governance discussion is pretty loose. I have a few areas of API governance that I’d like to discuss, but the goal is to really try and get a feedback loop in place with the community about what really matters to them. I will be augmenting my existing work with private discussions with this weekly public discussion, help align my API governance stroies with what is actually needed out there.
If you need API Evangelist to help out with API governance please let us know how we can help. And thank you 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.