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!
I’ve learned over the years the open does not mean the same thing to different people. Your open isn’t always my open, and there are a lot of businesses who will encourage you to be open with your data and resources, but aren’t always open to it with their data and resources. I feel like that is something that is shifting into overdrive to satisfy AI’s (Investors) appetite for data right now, and that you really don’t have a choice but to be open in today’s digital market.
There is a lot of shape shifting in service of artificial intelligence these days. The belief is that you have to be selling and speaking to AI right now or you are irrelevant. While there is some truth to this in the sprawling algorithmic noise that exists as a market, especially if you are a venture backed technology startup. But, as you move further away from the tech echo chamber you begin to realize there is actually many companies, organizations, institutions, and government agencies needing help with just API right now.
It is important right now to remember that the automation of your enterprise operations does not require the use of artificial intelligence. Automating using simple HTTP APIs using events, and on a schedule is a cheap, effective, and deterministic way to automate simple and complex enterprise business processes. While there may be a handful of automation use cases that “might” benefit from an agentic approach, it just makes more sense to keep your automation simple and API-driven.
Someone from a mainstream industry messaged me about their enterprises lack of focus on maximizing API management and experience over just the minimum viable integration required to make business work. Their frustration that their skills weren’t properly being applied per their job description, and that a more strategic approach wasn’t prioritized is a common challenge I hear, revealing that businesses really only care about the resulting application or integration, and not much more.
I found myself thinking about developer advocacy this week, and wondering how the philosophy, discipline, and role is doing in the age of artificial intelligence. A Google Trends search for the phrases shows a significant decline in the last couple of years, after much growth. Ultimately I think the concept of developer advocacy was too tied to the economic incentives of the startup paying the salary, and the shifting priorities of API and open source communities to this artificial intelligence hype.
Enterprises that have policies, processes, and people in place to help govern not just APIs, but the operations around them are less likely to be susceptible to short term trends and technology that doesn’t have a direct business purpose that satisfies the needs of multiple domains within an enterprise. Without policies helping govern small things like API versioning and error codes, as well as big things like the API gateway, documentation, and other foundational aspects of API operations, it is easy to lose your way.
I feel like we all are having to do way more work than we should to defend our realities from artificial intelligence in this moment. I work really hard to stay focused on the fundamentals of API governance, and keep my distance from applications. But, the tractor beam (money) around artificial intelligence is strong. I will keep working to be mindful of my mix of topics, working to stay focused on schema, APIs, rules, operations, changes, and evangelism, and leave applications to the experts.
“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
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