API Evangelist - Change Log

I am Kin Lane, the API Evangelist...

This is my online domain where I work to understand the world of the Application Programming Interfaces, also known as APIs. This new way of sharing data using the web is touching almost every aspect of our increasingly digital lives, providing access to the bits and bytes that make our personal and professional worlds go round.

This is my research specifically into how API providers are managing their change log and communicating it to their API community. Many successful providers publicly share a complete change log of everything that has been done to a platform, being transparent with the community about what has happened.

API Evangelist is a network of data driven projects and APIs which I curate and manage as part of this ongoing research, hoping to provide easy access to the moving parts of my work. Everything you see here runs on Github, making everything forkable, and reusable for both humans and machines.

API Evangelist Partners

These are my partners who invest in API Evangelist each month, helping underwrite my research, and making sure I'm able to keep monitoring the API space as I do.

Streamdata.io

Streamdata is a software vendor making real-time data accessible to all by operating a proxy turning request / response APIs into feeds of real-time events.

Uptrends

Uptrends is the ultimate monitoring tool to stay in control of the uptime, performance, and functionality of your websites, APIs, and servers.

3Scale

3scale makes it easy to open, secure, distribute, control and monetize APIs, that is built with performance, customer control and excellent time-to-value in mind.

Latest From Blog on API Change Log: The Picture We Paint With The Stories We Tell Around Each API Version Release

05 Dec 2017

I fell down the rabbit hole of the latest Facebook version release, trying to understand the deprecation of their User Insights API. The story of the deprecation of the API isn’t told accurately as part of the the regular release process, so I found myself thinking more deeply about how we tell stories (or don’t) around each step forward of our APIs. I have dedicated areas of my API research for the road map, issues, and change log for API operations, because their presence tell a lot about the character of an API, and their usage I feel paints and accurate painting of each moment in time for an API.

Facebook has a dedicated change log for their API platform, as well as an active status and issues pages, but they do not share much about what their road map looks like. They provide a handful of elements with each releases change log:

New Features — New products or services, including new nodes, edges, and fields.
Changes — Changes to existing products or services (not including Deprecations).
Deprecations — Existing products or services that are being removed.
90-Day Breaking Changes — Changes and deprecations that will take effect 90 days after the version release date.

The presence, or lack of presence, of a road map, change log, status and issue pages for an API paints a particular picture of a platform in my mind. Also, the stories they tell, or do not tell with each release paint an evolving picture of where a platform is headed, and whether or not we want to participating in the journey. Facebook does better than most platforms I track on when it comes to storytelling, by also releasing a blog post telling the story of each release, providing separate posts for the Graph API, as well as the Marketing API. It is too bad that they omitted the deprecation of the Audience Insight API, which occurred at the time of this story.

While I consider the presence of building blocks like a change log, road map, issues and status page a positive sign for platforms. It still always requires reading between the lines, and staying in tune with each release to really get a feel for how well a platform puts these building blocks to work for the platform. Regardless, I think these building blocks do adequately paint a picture of the current state of a platform, it just usually happens to be the picture that platform wants you to see, not necessary the picture the platform consumers would like to see.

Read The Blog

API Change Log News

These are the news items I've curated in my monitoring of the API space that have some relevance to the API definition conversation and I wanted to include in my research. I'm using all of these links to better understand how the space is testing their APIs, going beyond just monitoring and understand the details of each request and response.

Title	Source	Visit
0511 Downtime Notice and Notes News and Announcements (2016-09-07)	forum.worldofwarships.com
The Changelog GitHub and Google on Public Datasets and BigQuery (2016-06-29)	changelog.com
iOS developers will love our new Countly iOS SDK Here is our changelog (2016-06-28)	blog.count.ly
The Month At A Glance Road Map Support And The Recent Posts For Your API Platform (2016-04-30)	apievangelist.com
A little thing about release notes (2016-04-04)	medium.com
Sharesight API Changelog (2015-12-16)	www.apichangelog.com
Improving Developer Experience With 3scale Partner API Changelog (2015-09-09)	www.3scale.net
API Changelog (2015-08-24)	blog.opencagedata.com
We have a changelog (2015-04-27)	keenio.tumblr.com

If you think there is a link I should have listed here feel free to tweet it at me, or submit as a Github issue. Even though I do this full time, I'm still a one person show, and I miss quite a bit, and depend on my network to help me know what is going on.

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Some Examples

Some examples of good change log pages and efforts as part of API operations.

GitHub

GitHub is a social network for programmers. Git is a distributed software management program created by Linus Torvalds, originally for the Linux Kernel Development. GitHub is a hosted Git repository. Github allows you to take part in collaboration by forking projects, sending and pulling requests, and monitoring development.

Spotify

Spotify has created a lightweight software application that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with virtually no buffering delay. It was launched in the fall of 2008 and had approximately 10 million users by September 2010. Spotify offers streaming music from major and independent record labels including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal. Users download Spotify and then log onto their service enabling the on-demand streaming of music. Music can be browsed by artist, album, record label, genre or playlist as well as by direct searches.

Slack

Slack is a team communication application providing services such as real-time messaging, archiving, and to search for modern teams. It offers one-on-one messaging, private groups, persistent chat rooms, and direct messaging as well as group chats organized by topic. All content inside Slack is searchable from one search box and it integrates with a number of third-party services, including Google Docs, Dropbox, Heroku, Crashlytics, GitHub, and Zendesk.

Instagram

Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr. A distinctive feature is that it confines photos to a square shape, similar to Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid images, in contrast to the 4:3 aspect ratio typically used by mobile device cameras. Users can also apply digital filters to their images. The maximum duration for Instagram videos is 15 seconds.

Authorize.Net

Authorize.Net provides a number of ways to process transactions through the payment gateway, ranging from simple Buy Now and Donate buttons to fully integrated, highly customizable Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

CrunchBase

CrunchBase is the free directory of technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit. Our mission is to make information about the startup world available to everyone and maintainable by anyone.

Stripe

Stripe is a simple, developer-friendly way to accept payments online. They believe that enabling transactions on the web is a problem rooted in code, not finance, and they want to help put more websites in business.

Respoke

Respoke makes it incredibly easy to add real-time communications capabilities to the things you build. Integrate text chat, audio calling, video collaboration, screen sharing, and peer-to-peer data with just a few lines of JavaScript.

See All Organizations

If you think there is an organization I should have listed here feel free to tweet it at me, or submit as a Github issue. Even though I do this full time, I'm still a one person show, and I miss quite a bit, and depend on my network to help me know what is going on.

API Change Log Tooling

As I study each API, and API related service, I'm always looking for open source tooling that has been developed around each area of the API life cycle. This is an aggregate of tooling I've come across and aggregated as part of my API testing research.

See All Tools

If there is a tool that you think should be listed here, let me know by submitting a Github issue or Tweeting a link at me. I'm always looking for new types of tools, and get better at organizing them here and making sense.

About This Research

As I keep an eye on the space I curate news, bookmark organizations, watch interesting tools, and work to understand what deployment solutions are being applied by leading API providers. I take everything I find and publish here as part of my research.

I then take this research, and what I've learned and publish stories on the blog, and more long form content like my industry guides, and white papers for customers. This is one way that I generate revenue to keep it all going.

If you'd like to see me focus more on API change logs I could use more partners investing in this area, helping me find the time to study more about what is going on. Feel free to contact me directly if you want to talk more about API change logs.

Thanks for your support!