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.

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.

Runscope

Runscope is a SaaS-based company that provides solutions for API performance testing, monitoring and debugging.

Tyk

Tyk is an open source API Gateway that is fast, scalable and modern, and offers an API management platform with an API Gateway, API analytics, developer portal and API Management Dashboard.

Restlet

Restlet is providing the fastest and easiest API-First Platform as a Service that developers and non-developers working on API projects can use.

Dreamfactory

DreamFactory Software develops and markets a technology that enables developers to connect modern mobile applications to enterprise back-end infrastructure in the cloud.

Latest From Blog on API Change Log: An API Change Log And Road Map Visualization

05 Jul 2017

I saw a blog post come across my feeds from the analysis and visualizaiton API provider Qlik, about their Qlik Sense API Insights. It is a pretty interesting approach to trying visualize the change log and road map for an API. I like it because it is an analysis and visualization API provider who has used their own platform to help visualize the evolution of their API.

I find the visualization for Qlik Sense API Insights to be a little busy, and not as interactive as I’d like to see it be, but I like where they are headed. It tries to capture a ton of data, showing the road map and changes across multiple versions of sixteen APIs, something that can’t be easy to wrap your head around, let alone capture in a single visualization. I really like the direction they are going with this, even though it doesn’t fully bring it home for me.

Qlik Sense API Insights is the first approach I’ve seen like this to attempt to try and quantify the API road map and change log–it makes sense that it is something being done by a visualization platform provider. With a little usage and user experience (UX) love I think the concept of analysis, visualizaitons, and hopefully insights around the road map, change log, and even open issues and status could be significantly improved upon. I could see something like this expand and begin to provide an interesting view into the forever changing world of APIs, and keep consumers better informed, and in sync with what is going on.

In a world where many API providers still do not even share a road map or change log I’m always looking for examples of providers going the extra mile to provide more details, especially if they are innovating thike Qlik is with visualizations. I see a lot of conversations about how to version an API, but very few conversations about how to communicate each version of your API. It is something I’d like to keep evangelizing, helping API providers understand they should at least be offering the essentials like a roadmap, issues, change log, and status page, but the possibility for innovation and pushing the conversation forward is within reach too!

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!