menu_book API Evangelist Product
Papers
One practice, distilled from sixteen years of doing it.
Everything I know about one part of API operations, in about twenty pages — the status-quo stack, the anti-patterns I watch for, and a self-assessment you can run against your own operation on a Friday afternoon. No cohort, no sponsor, no filler. The cheapest way to borrow sixteen years of watching this industry.
Who buys it
The operator who has to do the work on Monday.
What's in every one
A Fundamentals paper takes one consequential piece of API operations and turns it into something you can act on — the status-quo stack as it actually exists, the trade-offs that matter, and the parts everybody skips. Then three sections that make it usable rather than merely interesting:
- The practice itself — how the work is really done, including the 75% that nobody automates
- Anti-patterns I watch for — the failures I've seen enough times to name
- A self-assessment — run it against your own operation and find out where you are
- Where this is going — what I'd bet on, and what I wouldn't
Why these are different
They differ from a blog post or a vendor white paper in three ways: the recommendations come from doing the work at scale rather than from a marketing calendar, no sponsor steers the conclusions, and each one is a living document carrying a version and an "as of" date. When the ground shifts, the paper gets revised — and you already own the revision.
Written before the scored research and still useful, still for sale. If you want the argument for how a practice should be run, it's here.
Want this read against your own API?
A paper tells you how a practice should be run. A Provider Checklist tells you where your own API stands against it — every check you are failing, what each one is worth on your score, and what to do about it.
What you get
21 published
The Fundamentals of API Discovery
Why you can't govern, secure, or automate what you can't find.
The Fundamentals of API Governance
The status-quo stack for governing APIs, from someone who stood one up at scale.
The Fundamentals of API Evangelism
The storytelling and human persuasion that decides whether your API gets used at all.
Publishing a Public MCP Server
A provider's guide to shipping Model Context Protocol as part of API operations.
Publishing an API Portal
A provider's guide to standing up the human-readable front door to your API.
The API Rating Rubric, Explained
What the Kin Score measures, why it's weighted the way it is, and how to move it.
The Fundamentals of the API Lifecycle
The end-to-end arc every API moves through, threaded by one machine-readable definition.
The Pricing of AI APIs
How the model labs price inference — and what every API provider can learn about pricing their own.
The Pricing of Communication APIs
How SMS, email, and voice APIs are priced — and the pass-through fees the headline rate hides.
The Pricing of Payment APIs
How payment APIs price a slice of value, not a cost of service — the original take-rate model.
Delivering a Modern API Integration Page with Arazzo
Turn your integrations page from a gallery of connectors into a directory of forkable workflows.
Making API Governance Conversational
Publish an MCP server for your Spectral rules so copilots and agents can govern APIs the way you do.
Running a Local Food Business on APIs
The services a small food producer actually needs — shipped with the working APIs.json artifact that describes them.
The Fundamentals of API Reusability
Why three teams keep building the same API, and how to make reuse measurable instead of aspirational.
The Agent-Era API Standards Onramp
A sequenced path through the standards a first public API now has to speak — one rung at a time, in order.
The Fundamentals of Context Engineering
Curating what an agent needs to reliably discover, understand, and use your API.
MCP Documentation Beyond Reference
Reference docs describe the interface; agents fail on the behavior — document the operational layer.
Explicit Agent Boundaries
Govern the Markdown that now drives your agents — a declared, machine-checkable contract for what an agent may change, may not change, and may not do.
The List of List Sellers
The people who email me to sell other people's contact data, recorded as contact data — with the machine-readable file attached.
The Fundamentals of Markdown
Every .md file that matters, where it came from, who is behind it, and why a twenty-two-year-old formatting convention became the interface layer of the agentic era.
Change on the Agent Surface
Governing versioning, breaking changes, and deprecation for the MCP tools an agent binds to.
Want a fundamentals paper on something I haven't covered?
The list grows by request. If there's a practice you're standing up and there's no paper for it, tell me what you're trying to do.