Why That Spectral Rule Is Not As Effective in Governing Your APIs As You Would Like

Bryan over at Postman asked me about the “rubric for comparing the different options” when it comes to linting OpenAPI artifacts in service of enterprise scale API governance. I have posted a list of the four open-source listing solutions (Spectral, Redis CLI, Vacuum, and Optic, and my intent is to learn more about what people are using to lint their OpenAPI artifacts. I wouldn’t call it a rubric yet, but I can share more about what my strategy is when it comes to a policy and contract driven approach to API governance.

Leaving Bloomberg and Going Back to API Evangelist

Friday was my last day at Bloomberg. I learned what I had come there to learn and now it is time for me to get back to my API Evangelist work. Moving forward, I will be taking my previous API Evangelist foundation, combining it with what I learned at F5 and Bloomberg (both enterprises), but also what I learned at Postman (a startup) through my conversations with numerous enterprise customers, as well as via my 125+ Breaking Changes podcast episodes, then applying it all as a new podcast (kinda sorta) and a set of API services focused on helping the enterprise govern API operations.

The Diff Between What JSON Schema and Spectral Provide When Mapping the API Landscape

I am working to better define and shape when and how I apply both JSON Schema and Spectral rules. Both specifications are invaluable when it comes to API governance, and have significant overlap, but there are many ways in which they differ when it comes to trying to define, shape, and ultimately govern the API landscape. I don’t pretend to have the answers here, but I know enough to know these are complex technological specifications seeking to tame a sprawling API landscape, and I enjoy writing about how I am seeing things work in hopes of making just a little more sense of it all.

Where Is This API Gateway Thing Going?

According to Gartner, the full lifecycle API management quadrant is going away, but acknowledges in 2023 the API gateway continues to enjoy an outsized amount of focus when it comes to internal and public API operations. The gateway is important, and tends to be where attention is focused in good times and bad, but other stops along the API life cycle are also critical to the conversation as well, and I’m looking to understand more about why, while trying to understand where things might be going.

Governing the Title of Your APIs With Spectral Rules

I enjoy how developing Spectral rules to govern an API slows us down to think about what matters. Really this is the biggest problem I see with people building APIs—-they are just moving too fast, and they refuse to slow down and think too deeply about things. I enjoy the frame rate in which Spectral rules attach themselves to the contracts we are producing for our APIs, and I figured I’d further expand on the opportunity to tell some stories around these machine-readable API policies we are applying, or often times not applying consistently across our API operations.

📑 API Not Just Rest – Read Write Collect