Weekly API Evangelist Governance (Guidance)
You will notice a shift in API Evangelist storytelling over the next couple of weeks as we invest more in Princess Heavy Beef Industries. This is where you begin to question our sanity a little bit, but please let me explain. Princess Heavy Beef Industries is the magical API realm from the mind of quobix, the creator of the Doctor, Vacuum, libopenapi, and other foundational API tooling. It has taken us a couple of months to grasp what is going on across their work, but after just a little poking around, we can say it is one of the more significant areas of investment we see occurring within the world of APIs.
First, take a look at the Doctor for editing and governing OpenAPI. The good Doctor provides a tough diagnosis, but it is well worth it. We will unpack what this means in coming weeks, but there is a HUGE amount of potential to be unlocked with expanding and building upon the Doctor. We reference this a little bit of this in our comparison of Alibaba Cloud vs. The OpenAPI Doctor, but it is something that will need a lot more exploration before it comes into focus. We are encouraging enterprises to build their own API client around OpenAPI, but also learning how the good Doctor can be used as a base for this. However, the Doctor is just a Hollywood facade over the top of Vacuum and libopenapi, which is the most important API story you can read today—seriously, read it.
As we feel the AI tides shifting under our feet we are working with savvy enterprises to tackle what matters the most to them. We are already getting a lot of questions from folks about how they can protect their digital resources in a time of artificial intelligence, which our guidance has remained constant for 15 years. Even though the hype around AI is beginning to fade we are sure that AI will continue to shape the technology, business, but also the legal side of APIs, as OpenAI is doing with the exclusive license that Microsoft Azure has on their API, and the theater around DeepSeek reusing the OpenAI API. It is all theater, but so was the Oracle vs. Google Copyright case, which was theater that has had real world implications.
We were enjoying the creative and progressive uses of API specifications that we stumbled across this week. First it was Cloudflare’s use of the OpenAPI specification to standardize the redaction of audit logs at the API gateway layer, second was the IETF proposal from Darrel Miller for an API Manifest specification that will help us all manage the API dependencies behind our applications. API specifications are important because it helps define what is happening with APIs for engineers, but we also feel that they enable API product managers to get in on the action, and that learning JSON Schema can help business stakeholders significantly reduce API drift, which is a common concern of enterprise business leadership.
As we help enterprises kick off their API governance efforts it is important to help them understand how they can minimize API governance becoming a bottleneck. We also are helping temper expectations that only 10% of teams will care about API governance, and 60% won’t have time, and about 30% won’t care at all. API governance is hard, and not always for the technical reasons you can imagine. It is usually because of very human reasons that API governance efforts struggle and it is important that teams are aware of what they are getting into and we talk openly about the hard bits. If you are looking to double down on this work, we recommend joining in on our weekly knowledge building sessions.
There will be a flurry of storytelling around the Doctor, libopenapi, and Vacuum this week as we unpack the richness this suite of tools brings to the API space. It can be tough to understand the technology, business, and politics surrounding the API specifications, but it is something we’ve been immersed in for fifteen years, and we can’t articulate strongly enough how important the approach taken by quobix is when it comes to the forward motion of enterprise operations, but also collectively the API community and wider ecosystem. It is impossible to capture in a single story or newsletter, but this last week’s API Evangelist narrative should provide you with a primer, but please buckle up—there is more to come.
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.