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.
This newsletter has found it’s natural place as the framework for my week. In response to some feedback on last weeks newsletter (thank you), I am working to inject more space and air into this weeks edition, while also using fewer (hopefully) words. The sections of my newsletter this week (and moving forward) reflect the key areas of my API Evangelist work—stories, conversations, guidance, services, discovery, and the API Commons.
Stories
My stories always reflect who I am talking with in any given moment, and right now I am spending a lot of time helping folks understand where they can get started with mapping their API landscape and their underlying API platform so they know where all of their APIs are—knowing where to begin with API governance is hard.
Conversations
My conversation with Heather Xiao, Founder and CEO at Horizon Zero Ltd about Smart Data, and Bruno Vaz da Costa, API Architect (digital plumber) at RHI Magnesita are exactly where I want to keep pushing my API conversations—towards API standardization with mainstream global industries, moving my conversations outside the tech echo chamber.
Guidance
I soft launched my API guidance in support of my first API review for the APIs.io search API. The overview page for my guidance is only one possible doorway, with reviews being the primary entry point via Just-In-Time API Guidance links.
Services
The review I kick-off for the APIs.io Search API reflects the services I am offering to my customers when it comes to API reviews. The one thing that stands out from this work for me is that I reversed engineered 27 strategy areas from across the 173 policies, 91 operational rules, and 325 API rules which shape my approach to API governance.
Discovery
I profiled the InfluxDB Cloud Time Series API, Moodys Entity Verification, Screening, and Risk API for APIs.io this week—beginning a week of investment in the discovery side of APIs.io after completing the first wave on review on the primary API powering our API search engine.
The API Commons
Profiling APIs, tell stories, having conversations, and engaging with customers is all designed to feed API patterns into the API Commons, providing nutrients for my own work, but also for the community. This week I have been thinking deeply about errors and entropy and I produced a base for the problem details for HTTP APIs. I am also playing around with a new approach to using APIs.json for powering AI, which I am calling my API Snacks—this weeks API Snack sends message using Twilio.
A Reflection of My Work
This newsletter outline is now the scaffolding for my work week—writing stories, engaging in conversations, producing guidance, actively discovering, and standardizing patterns for the commons, which I will be working to sustain through my services and partner network. This is the first week of my renewed investment in API Evangelist where I feel what I have all areas of my work defined—I just need to keep doing the work.
My goal is to just keep beating the drum across all of these areas. This is what I enjoy doing and what I feel adds the most value to the API conversation. I will keep working through each area of my API governance, applying out in the open using APIs.io, as well as API Evangelist APIs. It is API governance theater that I will keep augmenting, evolving, and evangelizing using the private and public conversations I am having as the grounding force for my work.
I really appreciate you tuning into my work—it means a lot.
