Weekly API Evangelist Governance (Guidance)
Helping you make sense of the technology, business, policies, and people of APIs since 2010.
A good time was had this month narrowing down the products and services that API Evangelist will be rolling out in February, which will set the stage for the rest of 2025. API Evangelist will focus on what we consider to be the missing API fundamentals of API operations—which are the areas that tend to introduce the most challenges when working to govern enterprise APIs.
Product & Engineering Bridge Building
API Evangelist is investing in building bridges between enterprise product and engineering by sharing a common definition for what an API product can be. We find that building these bridges involves making schema more accessible to API product stakeholders which helps them combat API drift with more precise API requirements. One of the greatest challenge in building and maintaining these bridges is that there can be a lot of time spent “other tooling”, rather than addressing the work that matters.
The Politics in the Technical Details
To help equip product and engineering stakeholders we are working to make the technical details of API operations more visible, and helping highlight why an API producers like GitHub would evangelize announcements around individual API properties. We envision a world where both API product and engineering stakeholders have equal access to configuring the properties of Spectral API governance rules so that they are able to play an active role in the politics that occurs surrounding the API specifications they will need to automate and govern the enterprise.
Working Through Shadows, Smoke and Mirrors
Seeing APIs is hard and making our APIs smaller doesn’t always make things better, but using Webhooks like Payment provider Adyen does with their OpenAPI published to GitHub, can help make API operations more visible using events. As API governance continues to define and shape our API operations, understanding and seeing API governance rules coverage and their impact will help show us where the gaps in our API operations are. However, sometimes those gaps are difficult to see from the inside of enterprise operations and some groups are beginning to develop more solidarity as API consumers to help bring attention to where the gaps are from the outside-in.
Snackable and Healthy Digital Bits for the Long Haul
The storytelling format and cadence of API Evangelist is coming into focus, with an emphasis on snackable and relevant stories and artifacts that will help you in your busy day, but are healthy enough and provide enough fuel for the long haul. Our goal is to provide tactical guidance you can use in the moment, while also still helping you pay attention to the strategic overview as well. We will begin rolling out the schedule for our new API governance knowledge builders this week, as well as a prototype for the API platform builder we teased a little bit about in last week’s newsletter. Stay tuned!!
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.