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While interviewing over a hundred people on my Breaking Changes podcast, the lack of alignment between business and technical groups while delivering and iterating upon APIs was the number one source of friction across enterprise organizations. While API governance is an essential aspect of it, ensuring that your API program speaks to business people as well as developers like ...

I hit a ceiling with my Artisanal APIs.json API profiling, in that I am pushing over a thousand individual APIs. It reminds me of running conferences, and once you get over 500 people, everything begins to change. I only have a little over 100 API providers, but when some API providers have 100+ individual APIs, it adds up very quickly. When you are working to properly profile APIs using OpenAPI and the operations around them with APIs.j...

Since the beginning of the specification, APIs.json has had an “apis” property as well as an “includes” properties, providing a way to immediately index your APIs, or “include” a reference to other APIs.json indexes. The APIs.json specification is designed to be flexible in how you can define and organize your collections, but as I spend more time profiling and indexing APIs, I am finding a need to further expand on how APIs.json indexes work together in...

I have long stated that I am focused on in the intersection of the technology, business, and politics of APIs with my storytelling. When I started API Evangelist I was fairly well versed in the technology of APIs, but I wanted to learn more about the business of APIs. I knew there was more to what I was seeing than just the technical aspects of doing APIs, so I sat down to learn. After a couple of years I realized that politics of APIs were another critical piece of the pie, leaving me stu...

I am like that kid in the Sixth Sense movies. But instead of dead people I just see APIs. When I see you, I don’t see a person. I see a bunch of API calls. To me, you are just the sum of all of the API calls you make in a day. Honestly, I don’t even care about all of the transactions you make in a day-—you only matter as part of a larger demographic aggregate of API calls that speak to where I think there is opportunity for growth. You are just part of a larger suite of derivative financia...

I am beginning to do work on what Steve and I have negotiated as the next generation of API Commons. As I do with most of my work, I’ll be doing it out in the open, working through my thoughts here on API Evangelist. The API Commons emerged to provide a licensing schema after it was clear that API copyright was going to the base line in the United States back in 20...

As I profile more APIs for my APIs.json work, I keep coming across GitHub repositories that are dedicated to managing API providers OpenAPIs. I am gathering these along the way so that I can publish a story about how these API providers manage their OpenAPIs using GitHub, but I’d also like to eventually provide a blueprint for companies to follow when doing this. Having your OpenAPIs well managed on GitHub is pretty beneficial to your operations as an API producer, but also can go a long w...

While profiling some of the top APIs for my APIs.json Artisanal work, which I am using to power APis.io, I have come across some interesting approaches to using GitHub for managing and publishing OpenAPIs for your API. I am going through each of their approaches, grading them, and then gathering what I feel are the common building blocks of their approaches. Just like profiling the developer portals for thes...

I have been playing around with several iterations of what is next for the APIs.io search engine. I have a v2.0 of the search engine and supporting APIs.json index almost reading to replace the current live v1.0. It is all an experiment and work in progress when it comes to API discovery, but a mix of prototypes that eventually I will work to harden based upon usage and interest. Steve and I feel pretty confident that there is a huge need for a public...

I am thinking a lot about the API producer and consumer experience. I am thinking a lot about the push and pull of our local development environments and cloud services and platforms. It isn’t just the technical details of this, but also the business details. I am hyper aware of the business and politics that swirls around our API operations, and the business of moving the value we generate daily into the clouds. Unfortunately the API evolution of the last decade was on the coattails of th...

One of the super powers of APIs.json is the ability to evolve the human-readable aspects of API operations into machine-readable ones–as this is how we are going to scale to deliver the API economy all of us API believers envision in our minds eye. I saw what Swagger (now OpenAPI) had done for API documentation back in 2013, and I wanted this for the other essential building blocks of our API operations. A decade later I am still translating our Read more →

I am pretty happy with manually searching Google and Bing for APIs across different spaces. The more APIs I add to my APIs.json index of APIs, the more words that appear as tags. So I regularly scroll through the list clicking on different keywords to see what comes up in the top 10 search results. I will be manually doing this on a regular basis, but I am looking to see what I can automate as well, so I wanted to see what the first couple of ste...

I am having fun pushing forward the APIs.json specification, while also building the next iteration of APis.io. The v1.0 of APIs.io is still powering the website right now, but I am exploring what is possible with the specification and search with a v2.0 of the APIs.io search engine I simply call explore. I will swap out v1.0 with v2.0 here shortly, but I wanted to gather my thoughts on...

I like to take little side trips in my API profiling work for APIs.json and APIs.io. I am in the middle of profiling AWS, which is 300+ APIs, and taking some time to make way through all the moving parts and properly profiling as APIs.json and OpenAPI. As a distraction I am now profiling the Read more →

I continued to automate the way I profile APIs while profiling the FactSet API this last week. I have been manually creating APIs.json overlays for the APIs.json, as well as OpenAPI so that I can continue to polish indexes for APIs while maintaining the original state of the OpenAPI provided by API producers. I need to enhance the names, summaries, descriptions, and tags for the APIs I am profiling while leaving the original APIs.json or OpenAPI intact so I can apply a rating to them while...

I am working my way through profiling many of the top APIs from Twilio and Stripe to AWS and Azure. If you’ve spent any time in these developer ecosystems you know there are a lot of APIs, and a lot of different moving parts to consider. My approach to profiling each API requires an APIs.json for each provider indexing each API, but also an OpenAPI describing the surface area of each API. Ideally API p...

I know a lot of folks think we are going to automate API consumption using AI. I am sure there are some layers of business and some APIs that will fit this profile. However, I know the API landscape too well, and know that there are a lot of business, political, and very human obstacles in the way of automating the integration of APIs into new desktop, web, mobile, device, network, and artificial intelligence applications. I want to take a moment to consider what is needed to automate API ...

I have been immersed in the profiling of the Twilio API, and as with most of my work, there are stories in the cracks of this profiling. Twilio maintains their own OpenAPI for their APIs, which I prefer to having to create myself. I’d like it if API producers would maintain their own OpenAPI and APIs.json, but I will take whatever I can get. I learn a lot from API producers when they maintain their own Open...

One thing I like about this blog format is that I can use the title, “What is API Governance”, over and over. Each blog post has the date timestamped in the title, so It captures my thoughts on the subject over time. Using my blog to work through complex concepts over time is how I govern the velocity of my career, speeding up and slowing down as required, to help me find the signal in the noise. I am the API governance lead at Bloomberg. I have helped define and shape the world of API gov...

As I was profiling the OpenAI API I noticed they had vendor extensions. This is a common thing I come across while profiling APIs, so I always make sure I spend some time evaluating the approach so that I can better understand why API producers feel the need to extend the spec. Twilio and Stripe both utilize extensions that help track maturity, PII, and other details of API operations that aren’t commonly e...

I think I am settling in on what I want to be doing for the next 30+ years. I want to make APIs visible and tangible. I enjoy doing API reviews at Bloomberg and feel defining rules that help standardize the public landscape is a meaningful thing to be doing. But I am curious at this moment, how do you make APIs something you can actually see so you can support operations, but also so that you can document this moment as it is passing by. I am already seeing how ephemeral and invisible all ...

I am profiling APIs for APIs.io. I started with Twilio and Stripe, and working my way through many more. I am profiling their API operations using APIs.json, outlining their business approach to doing APIs, but I am also making sure the surface area of each A...

I can’t stress enough the importance of providing well thought out and useful titles, summaries, descriptions, and tags for your APIs, taking full advantage of APIs.json and OpenAPI capabilities. I am sorry, but after profiling a couple hundred APIs (recently), and many thousands more over the years, I just don’t understand why API producers phone it in when it comes to providing this vital metadata. If you want to be successfu...

I profiled Stripe and Twilio using APIs.json recently. My API profiling process requires that I get to know an API, and while Stripe and Twilio do not maintain their own APIs.json index, they both do maintain OpenAPI for their APIs-—they just do it differently from each other. Stripe chooses to use one large OpenAPI for ever...

As I profile APIs for APIs.io using APIs.json, I break up OpenAPIs for providers along base path lines. I prefer distributed sprawl for my Artisanal APIs.json profiling work. I prefer my API representations using OpenAPI to be the smallest unit possible. Like OpenAI’s own advice for crafting OpenAPI for your ChatGPT plug—it just makes sense to k...