Permalink: 20240708220418

Found at “The Right Kind of Stubborn” on 2024-07-08 22:04:18 +02:00.

The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it.

Permalink: 20240708093811

Found at “It Needs to Scale | API Evangelist” on 2024-07-08 09:38:11 +02:00.

I don’t trust API providers, and I don’t trust API service providers anymore. I don’t trust them to be good stewards of API search indexes.

Perhaps the vision for APIs.io is that it grows by creating a federated network of API consumers.

Permalink: 20240705144952

Found at “Deactivating an API, One Step at a Time” on 2024-07-05 14:49:52 +02:00.

There are times when you have to stop serving an API. It might be that you want to replace it with a new, more capable version, or the features the API was providing no longer make sense. Whatever the reasons, what’s important is that no one depends on the API you’re about to kill. Otherwise, the consequences can be unpredictable.

API deactivation stages. The five stages of API deactivation: consumer limitation, consumer discovery, API deprecation, API sunset, and API deactivation. As you progress through the API deactivation stages the number of consumers decreases.

Permalink: 20240703165112

Found at “The Reasons for Using HTTP POST or PUT | API Evangelist” on 2024-07-03 16:51:12 +02:00.

Why Stripe API uses HTTP POST when it could use PUT?

The answer was simple, their customers utilized integration solutions that couldn’t support HTTP PUT

Permalink: 20240701220650

Found at “An Open Letter to the United Nations” on 2024-07-01 22:06:50 +02:00.

The Internet is an unusual technology because it is fundamentally distributed. It is built up from all of the participating networks.

Permalink: 20240701122452

Found at “The simple way to get better at business writing | Seth’s Blog” on 2024-07-01 12:24:52 +02:00.

Don’t do business writing.

Permalink: 20240701093005

Found at “Documentation | Pipes” on 2024-07-01 09:30:05 +02:00.

you can think of Pipes as a visual programing editor specialized on feeds, or a visual shell, or simply as a glorified feed configurator

Permalink: 20240627230846

Found at “(2) Fill the Gaps between API Consumer Lifecycle Stages” on 2024-06-27 23:08:46 +02:00.

API documentation can be so much more than API documentation. [It] can be the thread connecting all the stages of the API consumer lifecycle.

Permalink: 20240627230512

Found at “Making the Kinopio Source Code Public” on 2024-06-27 23:05:12 +02:00.

delivering software is more like delivering a gooey crying baby. It’s alive. Squirming, growing, and changing because the technologies it relies on do too.

Permalink: 20240621234746

Found at “Pluralistic: Against Lore (27 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow” on 2024-06-21 23:47:46 +02:00.

writing is lying. Storytelling is genuinely weird.

Permalink: 20240621234113

The gaps between API consumer lifecycle stages. What can fill the space that exists between different API consumer lifecycle stages? The gaps are where the most friction exists. Making sure that there’s a seamless transition between stages feels crucial.

Permalink: 20240618180220

Found at “Software Friction” on 2024-06-18 18:02:20 +02:00.

Friction compounds with itself: two setbacks are more than twice as bad as one setback.

Related to API Friction.

Permalink: Teaching is learning

I’ve just been invited to be one of the teachers on an upcoming product-related training initiative. At first, I felt reluctant because I thought that it would distract me from my lifelong path of learning. But then, slowly, I realized that teaching would be a way for me to learn more. I would learn about the students’ experiences, I would learn how to adapt my teaching to their needs, I would learn what other teachers have to show, and I would learn how to teach better. I accepted the invitation and I’m preparing a session on the topic of “API Product.”

Permalink: 20240612160705

Found at “Tolerant Reader” on 2024-06-12 16:07:05 +02:00.

be as tolerant as possible when reading data from a service. If you’re consuming an XML file, then only take the elements you need, ignore anything you don’t. Furthermore make the minimum assumptions about the structure of the XML you’re consuming.

Permalink: 20240612152109

Found at “Did we give up before AI arrived? | Seth’s Blog” on 2024-06-12 15:21:09 +02:00.

The system that pushed us to turn our writing into oatmeal and our art into paint by numbers was here long before OpenAi showed up.

Permalink: 20240612151719

Lately, I’ve been feeling I’m not getting enough juice from the social media feeds I follow. I don’t know if it’s the algorithms, the people I’m following, or just my change of appetite.

So, I’m investing more time into subscribing to and aggregating content directly from blogs. I hope that, by consuming directly from the source, I’ll be able to get better quality content.

Permalink: 20240611113913

Found at “How our brains cope with speaking more than one language” on 2024-06-11 11:39:13 +02:00.

the ability of bilingual and multilingual speakers to separate the languages they have learned is remarkable. How they do this is commonly explained through the concept of inhibition – a suppression of the non-relevant languages.

I’ve been experiencing this almost all my life since I’ve always interacted with several languages on a daily basis.

Speaking a second or even a third language can bring obvious advantages, but occasionally the words, grammar, and even accents can get mixed up.

Totally, and this is something native speakers often don’t understand and think we, multilingual people, are just being lazy because we don’t want to learn how to speak properly.

Permalink: 20240610152531

There’s some mysterious process at work here which I don’t even want to understand.—Philip Guston

Permalink: 20240610094404

Found at “PostgREST Tutorial: APIs made easy” on 2024-06-10 09:44:04 +02:00.

PostgREST is the quiet workhorse of API development, letting you tap into the power of PostgreSQL without getting bogged down in boilerplate code.

Permalink: 20240610093943

Found at “Building AI products — Benedict Evans” on 2024-06-10 09:39:43 +02:00.

the user never sees the prompt or the output, or knows that this is generative AI at all, and both the input and the output are abstracted away as functions inside some other thing

This is exactly how I see AI—and any other technology—unfold. It follows what I call “The Illusion of Immediacy.”

with any new technology, we begin by trying to make it fit the problems we already have, while the incumbents try to make it a feature (hence Google and Microsoft spraying LLMs all over their products in the last year). Then startups use it to unbundle the incumbents (to unbundle search, Oracle or Email), but meanwhile, other startups try to work out what we could build that would be truly native to the new technology.

Permalink: 20240606092306

Found at “Documenting API Workflows with Arazzo” on 2024-06-06 09:23:06 +02:00.

Arazzo is a major step forward in providing a standardized approach to documenting API workflows.

Permalink: 20240604101634

Found at “Silicon Valley’s Gold Rush Roots—Asterisk” on 2024-06-04 10:16:34 +02:00.

In 1855 miners in Grass Valley began a discussion club to exchange the latest ideas, and (…) the California Mining Journal, began publication there the following year.

California Mining Journal Volume 49, Number 6. A copy of the California Mining Journal Volume 49, Number 6, from February 1980. Highlights include the decrease in available public lands and price controls.

Permalink: 20240531105243

Found at “Common myths about platform engineering | Google Cloud Blog” on 2024-05-31 10:52:43 +02:00.

modern software systems are larger and more complex today than before, and the role of platform engineering has become increasingly vital in today’s world

Permalink: Don't design too much

Something I always keep in mind is “don’t design too much.” If you intuitively feel that this is a good idea, you can make a good decision right then and there.

That’s something I feel is a key point in design.—Tamotsu Yagi

Permalink: 20240528122850

Found at “WP21 | Matt Mullenweg” on 2024-05-28 12:28:50 +02:00.

Everyone developing and making decisions for software needs to use it.

Permalink: 20240524212849

Found at “Chromium Blog: Advancing Our Amazing Bet on Asymmetric Cryptography” on 2024-05-24 21:28:49 +02:00.

We think the important next step for quantum-resistant authentication in HTTPS is to focus on enabling trust anchor agility.

Permalink: 20240521181932

Something to pay attention to when working with thousands of APIs.

Found at “Rare things become common at scale” on 2024-05-21 18:19:32 +02:00.

scale causes rare events to become common

Permalink: 20240521142501

The change triangle. Meta-narratives set change in motion by creating a shared story to work toward. Micro-narratives contribute to, and draw from, this shared story. And mechanisms do the work required for change. But it is the social networks that distribute these narratives and spread the work through the system—Snowden et. al., 2022 (PDF).

Permalink: 20240521140947

Found at “Google announces Firebase Genkit with Ollama support · Ollama Blog” on 2024-05-21 14:09:47 +02:00.

Google unveiled Firebase Genkit, featuring Ollama support for running Google’s open-source Gemma model on your local machine

Permalink: 20240514114246

Found at “The Notifier Pattern for Applications That Use Postgres” on 2024-05-14 11:42:46 +02:00.

Listen/notify in Postgres is an incredible feature that makes itself useful in all kinds of situations.

Permalink: 20240509002953

Found at “Introducing the Model Spec | OpenAI” on 2024-05-09 00:29:53 +02:00.

We are sharing a first draft of the Model Spec, a new document that specifies how we want our models to behave in the OpenAI API and ChatGPT

Permalink: 20240502095547

Cover of the API Changelog Magazine issue 0.1.0. This is an experimental issue to obtain feedback and understand if doing a magazine—digital and print—makes sense.

Permalink: 20240502094715

Found at “Magazines aren’t dying—just ask these indie publishers - Fast Company” on 2024-05-02 09:47:15 +02:00.

There’s anecdotal evidence of an emerging and thriving community of indie publishers—a return to the magazine industry’s analog existence, but in a totally new way.

About advertisers, the article adds:

What the ad is saying reflects on the magazine itself. He isn’t promoting anything. He is supplying people with good people, good content. He is a curator.

Permalink: 20240501150054

We are not taught in schools to be invested in the process and in learning and discovering things.—Jessica Stockholder

Permalink: 20240429114409

Found at “An API Product Manager’s Honest Take on Bruno Pedro’s book, “Building an API Product” | by The API Nerd | Apr, 2024 | Medium” on 2024-04-29 11:44:09 +02:00.

Michaela Halliwell published a review of “Building an API Product.”

If you’re interested in API products, work on API products, or simply curious about the intricate world of digital product management, Bruno Pedro’s electric lemon yellow book, _Building an API Product: design, implement, and release API products that meet user needs i_s a guiding light.

Permalink: 20240426214848

Found at “Vinod Khosla’s 12 Predictions About The Future | by Seekmeai | Apr, 2024 | Medium” on 2024-04-26 21:48:48 +02:00.

most consumer access to the internet will be mediated by agents acting on behalf of users. These agents will filter information, perform tasks, and protect users from marketers and bots.

Permalink: 20240426214647

Found at “A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture” on 2024-04-26 21:46:47 +02:00.

the web doesn’t have incompatible versions, and JSON was explicitly designed by Doug Crockford to be versionless.

Permalink: 20240426174828

Found at “How To Create An API Business Product | Nordic APIs |” on 2024-04-26 17:48:28 +02:00.

Nordic APIs published a review of “Building an API Product.”

These are just a few insights from Pedro’s marvelous book, which is stuffed with practical and actionable advice that’s technical enough for advanced users but legible enough for complete beginners. If you find yourself intrigued after reading this API business product primer, we recommend reading Building an API Product in its entirety. It’s one of the best technical API guides we’ve read in recent memory.

Permalink: 20240426173238

Found at “No Abstractions: an Increase API design principle — Increase” on 2024-04-26 17:32:38 +02:00.

Instead of inventing our own names for API resources and their attributes, we tend to use the vocabulary of the underlying networks.

Permalink: 20240425125634

I’m writing a piece about how documentation can also be a source of friction. Documentation has its undeniable value, especially when it helps people use technical products. However, it also needs the attention of consumers. The more comprehensive and explanatory documentation is, the more attention it consumes.

I find this as an interesting paradox. While short, to-the-point documentation can lack detail, it also reduces the friction of using technical products.

Permalink: Thoughts About Immediacy

Immediacy in the present time is more about not postponing gratification and less about control. The amount of ever-present information makes it almost impossible to be attentive to what truly matters. Instead, we spend our time consuming whatever reaches us, always trusting the source.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. — Herbert A. Simon

People feel addicted to consuming information because they fear what they don’t yet know. They want to always be in the know. They don’t want to look ignorant.

Unseen sunset. The unknown is probably the most powerful force there is to convince people into doing things. Not knowing something generates anxiety and you naturally want to fight it. It’s human nature to eliminate as much uncertainty as possible.

Being able to always know more—independently of how useful the information is—is a powerful pleasure device. We prefer to feel the immediate pleasure of knowing that we know than to feel we’re missing some important piece of news we don’t know about yet.

Why do we humans crave immediacy? I believe humans crave immediacy because it provides instant gratification and a sense of being part of the experience. The desire for instant gratification is often associated with difficulty coping with uncertainty, coming from a lack of future perspectives. — in The Illusion of Immediacy, Bruno Pedro, October 2020.

Permalink: 20240423112149

Found at “Changelog-Driven Releases” on 2024-04-23 11:21:49 +02:00.

Imagine a changelog that serves not just as a history, but also functions as a source of truth for releases.

Permalink: 20240409174917

Found at “The Ruler of API Governance - by Bruno Pedro” on 2024-04-09 17:49:17 +02:00.

(…) things like API versioning, authentication and authorization, monitoring, analytics, and compliance need to follow what governance dictates. Depending on your business objectives you’ll find some aspects are more worthy of being governed than others.

Permalink: 20240409174725

Found at “What is API Governance? | API Evangelist” on 2024-04-09 17:47:25 +02:00.

API governance will be where enterprises govern the change that occurs across the industries they operate in, and absorb or exacerbate the change and velocity of their factory floors and supply chains.

Permalink: 20240402110750

Found at “OpenInterpreteropen-interpreter: A natural language interface for computers” on 2024-04-02 11:07:50 +02:00.

Open Interpreter lets LLMs run code (Python, Javascript, Shell, and more) locally. You can chat with Open Interpreter through a ChatGPT-like interface in your terminal by running $ interpreter after installing.

Permalink: 20240402110505

Found at “qingyun-wuautogen-eval” on 2024-04-02 11:05:05 +02:00.

AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation

Permalink: 20240402110422

Found at “ShishirPatilgorilla: Gorilla: An API store for LLMs” on 2024-04-02 11:04:22 +02:00.

Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs

Permalink: 20240324211106

Found at “flydelabsflyde:” on 2024-03-24 21:11:06 +01:00.

Flyde is an open-source visual programming language built to integrate with your existing codebase. It allows you to create and run visual programs and is designed to complement and enhance traditional textual coding, not to replace it.

Permalink: 20240319144219

I was watching a SXSW interview with Ray Kurzweil where he mentioned the singularity, the advancements in AI, and how humanity is changing at an incredible velocity.

The most interesting thing to me is not much where all the advancements are taking us. Instead, I’m fascinated by the exponential velocity of how technology has been advancing.

What takes a few months with today’s technology can probably be achieved in a few minutes 10 years from now.

Permalink: 20240313110355

Found at “Understanding API Complexity Through Schema Entropy - Stephen Mizell” on 2024-03-13 11:03:55 +01:00.

there are cases where API providers want to increase entropy as they evolve their APIs. One scenario is when they are evolving a request body schema.

Permalink: 20240313104629

Found at “Curation (vs the road to junk) | Seth’s Blog” on 2024-03-13 10:46:29 +01:00.

Economic pressure pushes for more, now. But more now might be stealing from we stand for something.

Permalink: Good Woowoo

Definition of good woowoo by Alan Kay. Good woowoo, according to Alan Kay, is the ability to translate hard rules into creativity.

Permalink: 20240304152322

On Saturday I attended—and presented at—the Product Weekend. I had never been to this kind of event and it felt refreshing, compared to the usual conferences. Here, the number of participants is limited, the conversations are meaningful, the presentations are super targeted and the whole experience doesn’t feel exhausting.

Presenting at the Product Weekend. This is me giving a talk about building API—and other technical—products. In the slide you can see the cover of my book “Building an API Product.” This talk happened on March 2, 2024 in Barcelona.

Two presentations were about Product Management leadership roles. The presenters were a Head of Product and a CPO. One thing I confirmed from those presentations and subsequent conversations was that most people end up being Product Managers by accident.

Yes, I was surprised to hear someone in a leadership position say it. I could even extrapolate that most people end up in management positions by accident. This includes Product Managers and also Engineering Managers.

Permalink: 20240303161051

Found at “The Beautiful Mess | John Cutler | Substack” on 2024-03-03 16:10:51 +01:00.

The thought process was not put in writing or communicated. The real strategy sits in people’s brains (continuous and unconscious) and is converted to a plan, pillars, or targets/goals.

Permalink: 20240301110138

Found at “Defcon: Preventing Overload with Graceful Feature Degradation” on 2024-03-01 11:01:38 +01:00.

To prevent overload from impacting its products, Meta developed a system called Defcon. Defcon provides a set of abstractions that allows incident responders to increase available capacity by turning off features, an idea called graceful feature degradation. By dividing product features into different levels of business criticality, Defcon also allows oncallers to take a variety actions depending on the severity of an ongoing incident.