Weekly API Evangelist Governance (Guidance)
Let’s give a big Monday shout out to our SDK partner APIMATIC. API Evangelist storytelling occurs because of APIMATIC, and I am thankful to have their support for this ride!
It was a fairly slow week as we shift from spring into summer. I am reading Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology by Gregory Bateson, which is informing my governance, domain-driven design, and tagging work—leaving me thinking about things at a very high level, but focused on the messy (beautiful) human aspects of what we do.
While the messy human aspects of doing APIs are pushing me to be more thoughtful about how I do what I do, vendors continue to see an opportunity to sell, intentionally choosing to not see the business and politics of API automation as they promise quick fixes to the human messiness of enterprise APIs.
I regularly use the automobile as an analogy for what is happening with not just the Internet, but also the latest wave of artificial intelligence agentic hype, as the automobile, Internet, and artificial intelligence all share some very destructive and isolating characteristics, while still apparently having some “use” to humanity.
When you look our across the landscape of startups, it is easy to see how we’ve lost our way, and while many of us still perform in a theater where the customers of the products and services startups matter, you can tell that a significant portion of startups are only tuned into the feedback loops with their investors.
It may seem like a win to be injecting API governance anonymously into developers work streams using artificial intelligence in their integrated development environments, however, you will also want to consider what gets lost when you don’t have the feedback loop with teams when it comes to your API governance policies and rules.
I shared an interesting approach to using OpenAPI extensions for overriding of Spectral API governance rules, providing an useful way to enforce encryption across API servers expressed in OpenAPI, but also offering an approach that can be generalized across many different rules using a mix of standard OpenAPI extensions.
As I am reading the Steps to an Ecology of a Mind I find myself thinking about how the rules based approach to API governance reflects a very ontological approach to governing our API operations, but I feel pretty strongly that you will need to also embrace an epistemological approach otherwise you are too dependent on outside services and tools.
I will write about it more today on the blog, but as of this week, I am joining forces with my old friend Jérôme Louvel as a co-founder of a company called Naftiko—coming on as the Chief Community Officer. I will be contributing and leading the open-source core of the Naftiko vision to modernize API consumption for cloud-native developers, enabling seamless and innovative API integrations that drive efficiency, enable versatile use cases, while elevating developer experiences.
“Thirty years ago, we used to ask: Can a computer simulate all processes of logic? The answer was yes, but the question was surely wrong. We should have asked: Can logic simulate all sequences of cause and effect? And the answer would have been no.” ― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity
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 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.