Weekly API Evangelist Governance (Guidance)
Let’s give a big Monday THANK YOU 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!
It was a short week. I was out west visiting family. I spent the weekend with my siblings celebrating our Mother’s birthday, then headed to hang out with my kiddo. While there was a lot of thinking and writing in the notebook, not much of it got published to the website. But there was still a lot of API governance goodness to be had even with the limited time spent online this week.
Getting the attention of enterprise people to help them with their APIs is not easy, but it is something I enjoy exploring in new and creative ways. Once you have their attention, I find that reducing the cognitive load of API governance by categorizing rules will help keep folks engaged and not ending up overwhelmed.
When I returned on Thursday I had our first public weekly API governance meeting, where I had four people join to share their views of what API governance means to them. This will continue every week, but this week I will be carving up into four separate topics, each with about 10 minutes for presentation and discussion. My goal is to keep people sharing their views of what is needed with API governance, but keep things changing and folks coming back each week.
As I work with customers to kick off automation of API governance rules I spent time going through the default Spectral as well as Vacuum rulesets to help understand what each of these tools come out of the box with. I am providing more robust API style guides beyond the basics, but I wanted to understand what the starting point was for my customers as they download and install these tools—then I can work to help them quickly fill in the gaps with additional API governance rules that meet their needs.
After reviewing these rules, it is clear that we need to establish a naming convention for API rules, as the names are all over the place. The work helped bring more clarity to the spectrum of API governance rules, which is important to clarify as each rule is being developed and applied. All of this work continues to reinforce for me that the basic building blocks of API governance is where this work is at, and to move API governance forward you have to focus on governing all the specs.
If you are looking to learn more about hands-on schema, APIs, rules, operations, changes, and evangelism in service of API governance I recommend you sign up for one of our paid API governance Knowledge Builder sessions. If you are just looking to listen in and are just curious about API governance I recommend coming by our free weekly API governance session Thursday at 12:00 PM EST. Everyone of any skill level is welcome to come by and listen in and ask questions.
I really appreciate you tuning in and I am looking forward to more discussions with you this week about API governance.
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.