A Visual History of APIs
In my free time I like to play with APIs and build small projects to feed my curiosity. Also a classically trained artist, I love to communicate my ideas visually sometimes on a canvas and sometimes through a flow chart.
We have come a long way since Roy Fielding's famous dissertation on REST and a handful of emerging technology companies like Salesforce, eBay, and Amazon leading the way to the definition of web APIs we use today.
Over the years we saw how Amazon web services laid the foundation, while some APIs like Flickr failed. By 2014, Obama's white house was launching APIs to enable the voice of democracy with APIs.
The launch of the iPhone in 2007 created the opportunity for the API economy to shape where products like Uber could be built using Google Maps APIs.
In 2014 we saw the arrival of tools like Postman and Github enabling developers to discover, evaluate and integrate with new APIs faster than ever before.
By 2015 there were news titles such as Why APIs will save your business from getting “Uber-ed”.
In 2022, we are seeing the evolution not just in more APIs being launched but also the jobs and functions evolving around shaping great API experiences. API Product Management has become a specialization and so has developer relations/developer evangelism. Customer support function has also evolved to serve API products (I talk about support models in my blog Driving meaningful customer impact with API Governance).
Did I miss something? Share your thoughts in the comments.
