API Evangelist Conversations

Emmanuel Paraskakis has spent more than fifteen years shaping the API products and tools the rest of us build on — API Blueprint at Apiary, Oracle's first cloud-native API Gateway, and Swagger at SmartBear — and now runs Level 250, advising enterprises and AI-forward startups. In this conversation we start where his career started, with the idea that an API is just a product, and trace how th...

David Biesack is the Chief API Officer at Apiture, where he designs the API-driven digital banking platform that hundreds of community banks and credit unions run on. In this conversation we go deep into the craft of API design with one of the few people who not only talks about this work at the conferences but goes home and actually builds it. We trace how OpenAPI 3.1 adopting JSON Schema 2020-12...

Daniel Kovac is a product engineer at Speakeasy, where the team turns OpenAPI into deterministic, production-grade SDKs and is now leaning hard into agent skills as the way developers interface with their CLI. In this conversation we start with where SDK developer experience is headed as coding agents like Claude and Codex become the execution layer, and why deterministic generation still matters...

Clemens Vasters is a Principal Architect at Microsoft who has spent twenty years building the industrial-grade messaging and eventing backbone of Azure — Service Bus, Event Hubs, Event Grid, Stream Analytics, the relay, and now Microsoft Fabric Eventstreams — while representing Microsoft across messaging standards like AMQP, MQTT, CloudEvents, and xRegistry. In this conversation we dig into JSON S...

Anna Daugherty leads product marketing at Arnica, where she has carried a career-long focus on developer workflows from the documentation and spec experience at Stoplight, through commercializing Spinnaker at Armory, into application security. In this conversation we trace how AppSec stays a developer-tooling problem at heart, why governance is the question that never goes away no matter the tool,...

Anil Dash is a technologist and writer who has spent more than two decades building internet technologies and chronicling what they do to the people who use them. In this conversation we start with markdown — the plain-text format he helped shepherd into the world as the product manager for Movable Type — and trace how a deliberately loose, "good enough" convention became the control pla...

Sam Newman is an independent consultant and author whose books on microservices and distributed systems have shaped how a generation of teams think about architecture. In this conversation we go back to the fundamentals — what a microservice actually is, why the connections between services so often mirror the connections between teams, and why most enterprises adopt this architecture for organiza...

Simon Wardley is the creator of Wardley Mapping, the situational-awareness technique now used by organizations around the world to understand the landscapes they compete in. In this conversation we start with the fundamentals — what a Wardley map actually is, why most "maps" in business are really graphs, and how giving space meaning lets you challenge the map instead of the person. From...

Christian Posta is Global Field CTO at Solo.io, where he has spent seven years at the intersection of cloud networking and artificial intelligence. In this conversation we work through what capabilities actually mean in the age of AI agents — specifically how you convey to a model what a function or API can do, when to call it, and why that natural language description is the foundation everything...

David Boyne has spent the last few years turning a side project for cataloging events into Event Catalog — an open source documentation tool that is quietly reshaping how teams bring discoverability to distributed and event-driven architectures. In this conversation we work through what Event Catalog actually is, why he treats messages, queries, commands, events, and services as the real primitive...

Mike Amundsen has been writing about hypermedia, REST, microservices, and the semantics of the web for the better part of two decades. In this conversation we walk the lineage — Paul Otlet, Ted Nelson, Wendy Hall, Leonard Richardson — through hypermedia and into the contemporary conversation around capabilities, affordances, and agentic systems. Mike makes the case that capabilities are not just a...

Derek Thompson of Ambassador came by for a discussion about code generation and artificial intelligence. I had began engaging with Derek's team about the importance of maintaining OpenAPI specs while generating code on Bluesky, and they agreed to have Derek come and share more of his expertise with me on the subject. I was very pleased to hear that first, they weren't focused on client S...

I sat down today with Marc Laventure of Scalar to talk about their API client and documentation offerings, and how they see OpenAPI as a specification. Marc's taken a slightly different approach than other API clients solutions and centering their solutions on just OpenAPI, rather than creating another spec. I feel like it is a sensible approach and can help reduce the complexity across API o...

Juan Cruz Viotti of Sourcemeta came by for a conversation about the schema registry solution he had recently built. Juan has gone deep into the JSON Schema rabbit hole, deeper than anyone else I've ever met. His validation tooling and schema registry are providing a new foundation for enterprises to get their schema house in order. This is something Juan and I both agree is the single most fo...

Adron Hall came by for a conversation about trains. Adron and I share a love of transit and trains, who also make their living slinging APIs. Adron had recommended I read Nothing Like It in the World by Stephen E Ambrose and Empire Express by David Haward Bain back a couple of years ago, which I finally did. Then things kept happening with AI and the current presidency that kept reminding me of th...

Frank Kilcommins of SmartBear came by to talk about the OpenAPI Arazzo specification. He shared the history how it came to be and how it is changing the conversation inside and outside the OpenAPI Initiative (OAI). Franks done amazing work to move the API workflows specification over the finish line, but also keep it evolving and moving forward afterwards. The specification has renewed energy with...

Quobix from from Princess Beef Heavy Industries came by again, this time to talk about OpenAPI Doctor and libopenapi at it's core. I knew "The Doctor" was a modular OpenAPI editor w/ governance built-in, but I didn't realize how deeply modularity is baked into it's design. This modularity allows Quobix to stitch together Vacuum, libopenapi, OpenAPI changes, wiretap, and ot...

Daniel Kocot came by again to talk about the lines between our private and public APIs. We had been talking about internal, first-party, and third-party APIs back and forth on LinkedIn, and I recommended that he come by and we will have a conversation. He helped me realize that my separation between the layers was more about access, control, and velocity over just about being inside or outside the...

I sat down with Vincent Biret, Microsoft Graph SDKs Principal Software Developer at Microsoft to talk about all things integration. I am interested in the intersection of APIs, specifications, and integrations where Vincent operates. Vincent shared his view of important role that OpenAPI plays in taming the Microsoft Graph API landscape, but specifically how it gets applied as part of producer or...

I have been wanting to sit down with Dave for a while now, but I needed to spend more time with Vaccuum to understand where it would fit into my world of API governance. I did that, and then finally got to sit down with Dave Shanley of Princess Beef Heavy Industries, and creator of Vacuum, OpenAPI Doctor, and other important OpenAPI tooling. I finally got the full background of why he felt Spectra...

Ben Hutton of the Guild came by to talk about his recent LinkedIn thread about APIs vs SDKs. The topic is an evergreen one that brings out all of the opinions and I enjoy talking with Ben about it to get his pragmatic view of things. Ben has a lot of experience as a software engineer and working on the JSON Schema specification, which I think gives him unique perspective on what is needed when it...

My friend Emanual had tagged me in one of Reza's posts on LinkedIn about API integrations being dead, so I invitied Reza to come over and explain more about what he meant. I knew the title was bait, but I was interested in hearing Reza's argument and after the conversation it is clear that he's done a lot of thinking at this intersection and wasn't just adding to the AI hype. I...

Lorna Mitchell, OpenAPI Specification Maintainer with the OpenAPI Initiative, and overall API experience expert came by again, this time to talk about the intersection of OpenAPI extensions and experience. I would say our conversation also intersects with the last conversation I had with her about OpenAPI overlays, but focuses on the need to extend the spec to meet the needs around specific experi...

Claire Barrett, Digital strategist at APIsFirst came by to talk with me about the realities on the ground with APIs in large enterprises and the increasing chatter regarding the return on investment APIs. Claire's view of things is what API service providers should be tuning into when it comes to aligning product with engineering, treating APIs as a product, and making sense of the real world...

Henry Calvert, Global Head of Future Networks at GSMA came by to talk about the GSMA Open Gateway, a suite of APIs the GSMA Open Gateway global initiative aims to drive the exposure and monetization of telecommunication networks through APIs and federation. The GSMA launched the Open Gateway APIs under the Linux Foundation in a project called CAMARA, and you can find all the OpenAPI specifications...