I’ve been immersed in finding the signal within the noise of the markets for most of February and March. There is a lot that does not make sense when you look out across the market today. The recovering libertarian within me is appalled at the market right now. Up is down. Left is right. Everything is defying gravity in this moment. But I guess that is what a bubble is. Regardless, I am building a business, and I need to try and make sense of things—regardless of the irrationality of the market.

With my work across my personal, professional (API Evangelist), business (Naftiko) newsletters I feel like I am staying grounded in the markets on a week to week basis. With my work on Naftiko Signals I fee like I have found a way to stay grounded at a quarter to quarter basis. If I pick my head beyond that I feel like I am in Las Vegas during a sandstorm while there are thousands of technology conferences going on simultaneously. I get that same feeling you have after spending too much time in Vegas. I will be keeping my head mostly down at the weekly and quarterly levels.

APIs are the Foundation
I spent some time reworking the API Evangelist site while I was traveling recently. It gave me some time to look through the 5000 blog posts, and almost 30K APIs I’ve spent time thinking about. And after 15 years, nothing has changed. Nothing. The same technology, business, and politics of APIs still apply. Designing your APIs for multiple types of applications is still what matters. You still need documentation, SDKs, and CLIs. You still need to secure things. You still need to monitor and observe things. Nothing has changed, but if you listen to the market, everything has changed. Why do you think that is?

Sure, we have a few new application patterns emerge, requiring more event-driven, graphs, language models that put more constraints and demands on our APIs. But that was the revelation in the shift from desktop to web to mobile — we needed programmatic interfaces that could be used in whatever applications we were cooking up. The technology of this has evolved somewhat, the business of this has become extremely volatile and predictive, and the politics of this has become much, much, much more difficult to assess. But the foundation hasn’t changed much at all. If you have been thoughtfully on the API journey as an enterprise, you are on firmer ground than the rest of the hustlers in your market, which has always been the argument.

Priorities Are Always Changing
What has changed, and will the one thing that you can count on will keep changing, are priorities. While API design is just as important as it ever was, I think one of the biggest considerations of API design in the current market, is that priorities will perpetually be changing. The musical chairs will only increase in frequency. People will lost their job regularly. Management will come and go frequently. Heads will roll on a regular basis. And your API design will have to absorb it all. But, really, this was the original promise of APIs, and why you want to be API design-first, so that you can move fast and stay aligned with wherever the customers are going.

The “Line Go Up” mentality rules. The predictive nature of our technology with AI, and the business with crypto and polymarket, means the politics of APIs are extremely volatile. We’ve done it to ourselves. Those who strike a balance between the deterministic and non-deterministic in today’s market will do the best. They won’t blow away when the winds change course. Those who stay the course on open waters despite the ripples and waves that try to shift their course will do the best. But it will be those who can also adapt along the way, change course when it makes sense, and embrace the priorities always changing, and finding the opportunity in the cracks, or at scale in the moment are the ones who are going to thrive. And you do this with APIs.

Listening to the People
Coming back into the market without the insulation of Bloomberg, and the platform of Postman, has taught me a lot about listening to the people. The trick is, you have to know which people to listen to. You have to surround yourself with the right people, subscribe to and follow the right people. It helps to be listening to a diverse spectrum of people across a diverse spectrum of online and offline channels and industries. If you operate in a bubble then listening to people will not bring the answers you are seeking regarding what your priorities should be in this moment. If what you are hearing is 100% validating what you are feeling, then in my experience, you should start to worry about your direction.

Listening to the right people is key, but actually listening is the more important thing. Make sure you are hearing what they are saying over what the voices in your head or the bubble are saying. Question and interrogate the voices in your head, and not via your usual insecurities. Listen to the people you are talking to. Answer their questions. Embrace their criticism. Then trust in your ability to make sense of it all. But be honest about your biases. That is why this newsletter is ladened with algorotoscope images. Bias is everywhere. Especially in your own head and experiences. Truly listening doesn’t mean you do everything you are told, but it means that you influenced by what you heard and there is the possibility for change in how you approach the market each week and quarter.

Speaking to the Market
Speaking to this market amidst all the noise seems impossible. This is by design. You must have an AI megaphone to speak to this market. My usual blog RSS, witty “tweets”, and curious podcast episodes don’t speak loud enough for today’s market. That doesn’t mean I stop those things though. It does force me to think more about how people are getting their information. I’ve always excelled at speaking at the micro and macro levels, while struggling with what comes in between. My one paragraph, five bullets, and one paragraph blog post format doesn’t get consumed like it used to. People don’t actually “listen” to podcasts anymore—they have them on as background noise, as they are clauding their way through their week and their quarter.

With Claude whispering in your ears, it is tougher for me to speak to you. Get your attention. If I do, you often do not know it is me. Claude magically connects to that API you need, and the OpenAPI I publish five years ago that enables that is obfuscated. Claude magically tells you that you will need to apply governance rules to your API as part of your CI/CD pipeline, not the four blog posts I’ve written over the last five years outlining how. It isn’t just me anymore. Your internal documentation teams are being obfuscated away, if they are still there at all. Authorship isn’t a priority in a week to week, quarter to quarter, LLM powered journey. The governance you receive in the form of guidance and guard rails are increasingly hidden from view, for better and worse.

Stories are All that Matters
Nothing has changed and everything has changed. I can hold both these truths in my head in this moment. I am still telling you that you should be doing APIs in 2026, just like I was in 2010. I am still telling you that you should be doing simple REST APIs. I am still telling that you should be securing and monetizing (measuring value exchange) across your APIs. I am still crafting stories that help articulate how you do this. Nothing has changed. But you don’t read my blog, visit me on Twitter, and drink beer with me at meetups anymore. However, when one of my stories does reach you, it still has the same potential as it did in 2010 when I first began this evangelism work. Just there are more channels, more noise, more distortion, and more distractions.

Telling stories is more important than ever. I don’t mean publishing content. I mean telling stories. Genuine stories are what will cut through the noise. But it doesn’t mean you’ll obtain the reach that you used to be able to achieve. There is just too much noise, distraction, and potential collisions for your stories. You have to cultivate your network more thoughtfully, one human being at a time. The scale at all costs playbook of yesterday won’t apply as it has in the past. Yes, you’ll need your AI bullhorn. You’ll need AI to translate the verbose complexity of the ubiquitous entropy that exists today. But the human connections will be what matter the most. Human stories will have a longer shelf life than your average content out there today. Truly listening and making connections will be the most important stop along your API lifecycle, while also telling stories to the agents, minimizing the damage they do, while also getting them to do your bidding.