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Hiding APIs In Plain Sight

I’m always surprised by how secretive folks are. I know that it is hard for many folks to be as transparent as I am with my work, but if you are doing public APIs, I have a basic level of expectation that you are going to be willing to talk and share stories publicly. I regularly have conversations with enterprise folks who are unwilling to talk about what they are doing on the record, or allow me to share stories about their PUBLIC API EFFORTS!!! I get the super secret internal stuff. I’ve worked for the government. I don’t have a problem keeping things private when they should be, but the secretive nature of companies around public API efforts continues to keep me shaking my head.

People within enterprise groups almost seem paranoid when it comes to people keeping an eye on what they are up to. I don’t doubt their competitors keep an eye on what they are doing, but thinking that people are watching every move, everything that is published, and will be able to understand what is going on, and be able to connect the dots is borderline schizophrenic. I publish almost everything I do public by default on Github repositories, and my readers, clients, and other folks still have trouble finding what I am doing. You can Google API Evangelist + any API topic and find what I’m working on each day, or you can use the Github search to look across my repositories, and I still have an inbox and social messaging full of requests for information.

My public by default stance has done amazing things for my search engine and social media presence. I don’t even have to optimize things, and I come up for almost every search. I get regular waves of connections from folks on topics ranging from student art to the government, because of my work. The schema, API definitions, documentation, tests, and stories for any API I am working on is public from day one of the life cycle. Until I bring it together into a single landing page, or public URL, the chances someone will stumble across it, and leverage my work before I’m ready for it to be public is next to zero. The upside is that when I’m ready to go public with a project, by the time I hit publish, and make available via the primary channels for my network, things are well indexed, and easily found via the usual online channels.

I feel like much of the competitive edge that enterprise groups enjoy is simply because they are secretive. There really isn’t a thing there. No secret sauce. Just secret. I find that secret tends to hide nothing, or at least is hiding incompetency, or shady behavior. I was talking with a big data group the other day that was looking for a contractor that was skilled in their specific approach to doing APIs. I asked for a link to their public APIs, so I could assess this specific approach, and they declined, stating that things private. Ok, so you want me to help find someone who knows about your API data thing, is well versed in your API data thing, but I can’t find this API data thing publicly, and neither can anyone else? I’m sorry, this just doesn’t make sense. How can your API data thing ever really be a thing, if nobody knows about it? It just all seems silly to me.

Your API, it’s documentation, and other resources can be public, without the access to your API being public. Even if someone can mimic your interface, they still don’t have all your data, content, and algorithmic solutions. You can vet every consumer of your API, and monitor what they are doing, this is API management 101. You can still protect your valuable digital assets while making them available for discovery, and consideration by potential consumers. You can make controlled sandbox environments available for talent acquisition, building of prototypes, crafting visualizations, doing analysis, and other ways businesses benefit from doing APIs. My advice to companies, institutions, organizations, and government agencies looking to be successful with APIs is stop being so secretive, and start hiding everything you are doing with your public APIs out in plain sight.