API Business Models

Needing Inspiration to Care About APIs?

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I always enjoy when I have the opportunity to light up someones imagination when it comes to APIs. I have had a couple of conversations with folks recently who had never heard about APIs until they talked with me, and then after fifteen minutes of chatting had developed a curiosity around the fascinating acronym. I have been captivated by APIs for almost twenty years, with a decade long obsession around everything API. APIs keep my attention because they come in so many shapes and sizes and are something that is touching almost every aspect of our personal and professional worlds. I have to admit though, there are times where I get sick of APIs, but inevitably I come across some new use of APIs that renews my passion and interest. I get the reality that not everyone cares ab out APIs at the level I do, but I am always happy to try and convince people that they should care, even if they aren’t a developer.

One way I am able to capture people’s attention when it comes to APIs is by having a treasure chest of stories about how APIs can make a difference in areas that people care about. One recent area of inspiration I stumbled into involves a story I was reading about Fighting food wise, one apple at a time in the Washington Post, which is summarizes as follows:

Katherine Sizov is only two years out of college, but her high-tech sensors — which monitor ethylene, a gas key to the ripening of fruits and vegetables — are keeping watch over 15 percent of U.S. apples.

Which after reading I typed “Strella Biotechnology”, the name of her company plus “API” into Google. This is something I do multiple times a day as I am reading an interesting article. It is how I perpetually stumble into interesting areas of API development and meet people doing interesting things with APIs. Strella Biotechnology doesn’t have any formal public APIs, but I did stumble across a listing on Datanyze which showcases Strella Biotechnology’s usage of Cloudflare, Amazon, and Google APIs. Now, just because Strella Biotechnology doesn’t have a public API program doesn’t mean they aren’t using APIs, I guarantee the sensors they are using have APIs, and there are additional layers to their technology stack that depend on APIs-—it will just take more detective work and reaching out to them to be able to learn more about their overall API awareness and usage.

Strella Biotechnology approach to monitoring the apple industry has the potential to provide me with an interesting API story for my Breaking Changes Podcast, for this blog, or via the Postman blog. It also provides an inspirational story for how APIs can be used to improve upon our food supply chain while also benefiting the environment. All of which gives me more inspiration for me to care more about APIs, and a potential story to help light the passion any other folks when it comes to what APIs are and why they matter. I will reach out to Strella Biotechnology and see if they are API aware already and have interesting stories to share, or maybe even light the API fire under their teams imagination around how APIs can help them better achieve their own business goals. No matter what, just this post alone provides me with another story for my API storytelling chest, which I can use to push folks to care a little bit more about the world of APIs beneath almost everything today.

This article originally appeared here.

Kin Lane
Kin Lane is a writer, storyteller, and recovering technologists. Kin is the Chief Evangelist at Postman, and is helping share the story of how Postman is the next generation of API development environment (ADE), while also continuing to tell API stories on API Evangelist about what is happening across the API sector.

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