Categories
Fourteen slices of the API conversation. Every question lives in exactly one of them.
API Basics 14
What an API actually is, the words people use for them, and the ideas everything else is built on.
- How do I get started with APIs?
- How many APIs should my organization have?
- Is my API really RESTful?
- What does REST actually mean?
- What is API governance?
Design & Architecture 17
REST, RPC, GraphQL, event-driven, hypermedia — how you shape an API and what the trade-offs really are.
- Do I need an API design style guide?
- How do I govern REST, event-driven, GraphQL and gRPC together?
- How do I mock an API before I build it?
- How do I name things in my API?
- How should I do pagination?
Specifications & Contracts 9
OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, JSON Schema, Arazzo, Overlays, APIs.json — the machine-readable artifacts that make an API knowable.
- How do I stop my API from drifting away from its documentation?
- What are OpenAPI Overlays for?
- What is APIs.json?
- What is Arazzo and do I need it?
- What is AsyncAPI and when do I need it?
Security & Authentication 8
Keys, tokens, OAuth, JWT, encryption, and the difference between securing an API and looking like you did.
- How do I set rate limits, and what should they be?
- How do I stop leaking API keys and tokens?
- How should I secure my API?
- Should I log every API request?
- What are OAuth scopes for, and how should I design them?
Management & Operations 10
Gateways, plans, rate limits, monitoring, observability, logging, and the day-to-day of running APIs.
- Do I need a status page?
- Do I need an API gateway?
- How do I manage policies consistently across multiple API gateways?
- How should I deploy my API?
- Should I offer an SLA?
Governance & Standards 11
Design guides, style rules, linting, policies, audits, and the difference between capital-G and lowercase-g governance.
- How do APIs help with regulatory compliance?
- How do I find all the APIs in my organization?
- How do I get teams to actually follow governance rules?
- How do I govern event-driven APIs?
- Should I adopt an industry standard or design my own API?
Lifecycle & Change 9
Versioning, deprecation, change logs, road maps, testing, CI/CD — how an API moves through time without breaking people.
- Do I need a change log and a road map?
- How do I deprecate an API without burning my consumers?
- How fast should we be shipping API changes?
- Should I treat my API as a product?
- Should my API definitions live in Git?
Discovery & Documentation 6
How APIs get found, documented, catalogued, and understood — by humans and increasingly by machines.
- Do I need a developer portal?
- How do I keep my documentation from going stale?
- How do I make my API discoverable?
- Should I list my API on a marketplace?
- What should my API documentation include?
Developer Experience 9
Onboarding, SDKs, clients, collections, support, community, and everything that happens between landing and first call.
- How do I earn the trust of the developers building on my API?
- How do I get feedback from my API consumers?
- How do I reduce the support load on my API?
- Should I build SDKs for my API?
- Should my API have a free tier?
Business of APIs 7
Monetization, pricing, plans, products, partners, marketplaces, and how APIs actually make or cost money.
- Does my API have to make money directly?
- How do I choose API tooling vendors without getting locked in?
- How do I measure whether my API is successful?
- How do I monetize an API?
- How should I price my API?
AI & Agents 7
MCP, agent readiness, agent skills, copilots, and what changes when the primary consumer of your API is not a person.
- Do I need an llms.txt for my API?
- How do I version an MCP server without breaking agents?
- Should I just generate an MCP server from my OpenAPI?
- What are agent skills, and how are they different from APIs?
- What does "agent-ready" actually mean for an API?
Policy, Privacy & Power 10
Regulation, privacy, consent, surveillance, sovereignty, antitrust — the political dimension of APIs that most people skip.
- Can an API be copyrighted?
- Do government APIs actually work?
- Should I build my business on someone else's API?
- What does "open" mean when people say "open API"?
- What does privacy actually mean for an API?
History & Landscape 9
Where this all came from — EDI, CORBA, SOAP, the social APIs, ProgrammableWeb — and what the landscape looks like now.
- Is SOAP dead?
- What can EDI teach us about APIs?
- What happened to ProgrammableWeb, and what does it mean for API directories?
- What is the API economy?
- When did the first web API launch?
About API Evangelist 10
What API Evangelist is, how the Kin Score works, what apis.io does, and what you can buy or hire.
- Can I get my API listed on APIs.io?
- How do I get my company removed from the catalog?
- How is my API scored, and can I improve it?
- Is API Evangelist independent, or is this vendor content?
- Something about my company in the catalog is wrong. How do I fix it?