Weekly API Governance (Guidance)
My name is Kin Lane—I am that API Evangelist guy who has been paying attention to the technology, business, policies, and people of APIs since 2010.
I really enjoy how this API newsletter is guiding my API work each week. It gives me enough freedom to respond in the moment to what matters each week, while also forcing me to apply myself in each area of my work and deliver something useful and practical to my audience and customers. This week I also learned that I can revisit work from previous weeks and months, recycling, but also be building upon the hard work I’ve accomplished prior to launching version 2.0 of my API Evangelist newsletter.
Stories
This week I am focused on talking with mainstream companies about their API operations and tailoring my storytelling to what they need, learning to speak more about integrations and business outcomes, rather just API blah blah blah, as I help enterprises think through how they can get their data, content, and algorithms into other platforms and services.
Conversations
I spoke with with Jamie Tanna, Engineering Productivity at Elastic about the realities of API versioning and management change, as well as Robert Buchanan, API Evangelist Driving API Integrations and API First practices at Procter & Gamble about where the deficiencies are in our API operations.
I really enjoy learning from people like Jamie about versioning because it is one of the hardest aspects of doing APIs, and I’ll kvetch with Robert about the realities of doing APIs anytime, because he sees things like I do, is way smarter than I am, and isn’t afraid to tell it like it is.
Guidance
I am putting a lot of work into my API guidance right now, ensuring that it covers all of the policies and rules I apply during API reviews. My approach to API governance centers around API guidance being self-service, but also just-in-time. Meaning guidance should be available as text and videos 24/7 in easily accessible location, and it should always be linked up as part of API governance enforcement during design, develop, and build-time.
Every one of my rules you will encounter during an API review comes with a link back to the relative API guidance with text and video guidance, as well as examples of how to accomplish what is being governed.
Services
I am here to help you plan and execute the governance of your enterprise API operations across the key areas areas of your operations thats teams will need help.
Strategy, Platform, Policies, Rules, Lifecycle, Guidance, and Evangelism
Strategic API services are designed to work in concert with more tactical API services, helping you invest at variable rates when it comes to your API strategy.
Discovery
I have profiled 300+ of the Amazon Web Service APIs and continuing to profile Azure, Google, and the other cloud service providers. You can find all of the APIs.json and OpenAPI artifacts for these APIs on GitHub, which are used to power the APIs.io search engine.
The API Commons
The API Commons interface license provides a legal position of the naming, ordering, and overall design of your API, not just the code or other parts. An interface license will help define the legal tone you take with how your API paths are able to be put to work within other applications and integrations when published as part of your APIs.json contract. You can find JSON and YAMl examples of the interface license on the API Commons, and you can fork the GitHub repository to apply as part of your API operations.
A Rough Week
I apologize for a somewhat anemic newsletter this week. I did write some of the content referenced here this week, but I also reused other pieces from previous weeks before my newsletter launched.
I am struggling to pull it together because my mother Barbara Lee Gorrell passed away on Wednesday night at the age of 74. I am devastated, and working to make sense of things.
I do not want to lose the momentum I have built up, but I am also struggling to keep going. I will be taking it easy this week, but honestly my work helps me get up off the couch. Thank you for your support, tuning in, and helping make all of this possible.
