Jean Yang’s research on programming languages at Carnegie Mellon led her to realize that APIs are the layer that makes or breaks quality software systems. Unfortunately, developers are underserved by tools for dealing with, securing & understanding APIs.

That realization led her to found Akita Software, which led her to join Postman by way of acquisition. That move, at least in part, also led her to join us on this very podcast. We think you’re going to enjoy this interview, we sure did.

On a previous episode of Go Time we discussed binary bloat, and how the Go protocol buffer implementation is a big offender. In this episode we dive into the history of protocol buffers and gRPC, then we discuss how the protocol and the implementation can vary and lead to things like binary bloat.

Natalie and Johnny are joined by the co-founders of APIToolkit for a deep-dive on the topic. We discuss building them, maintaining them, how can we all be better users, and much more along the way.

In this episode, Gerhard follows up on The Changelog #375, which is the last time that he spoke Crossplane with Dan and Jared. Many things changed since then, such as abstractions and compositions, as well as using Crossplane to build platforms, which were mostly ideas.

Fast forward 18 months, 2k changes, as well as a major version, and Crossplane is now an easy choice - some would say the best choice - for platform teams to declare what infrastructure means to them. You can now use Crossplane to define your infrastructure abstractions across multiple vendors, including AWS, GCP & Equinix Metal. The crazy ideas from 2019 are now bold and within reach. Gerhard also has an idea for the changelog.com 2022 setup. Listen to what Jared & Dan think, and then let us know your thoughts too.

This week Adam is joined by Asim Aslam, the founder of Micro - a new cloud platform entirely focused on the developer experience of consuming and publishing public APIs. Asim’s journey spans many years of open source work on Micro. His sole focus right now, is evolving that work into a commercially viable business. This episode is jam-packed with stories of great timing, grit, resilence, success and failure, and, of course, lessons learned.

Suz, Amal, and Chris join Jerod to discuss what APIs are all about, share some APIs they admire, and lay out principles and practices we can all use in our APIs.

Did you know you can make a device vibrate via a webpage? Neither did we until we popped open Luigi De Rosa’s super cool repo that collects many of the lesser known things browsers can do in 2020.

On this episode we hang out on his list and discuss which APIs were surprises to us, which we think are the most useful, which we wish would die in a fire (sorta), and what you might get if you mash up a few of these APIs.

Panelists Mat Ryer, Johnny Boursiquot, Jaana B. Dogan, and Mark Bates discuss how humans build machine to machine integrations via APIs — the good, the bad, and the ugly — and how to give yourself the best chance of success.

Jerod talked with Paul Fremantle, the CTO and Co-Founder of WSO2, about their new programming language, Ballerina — a cloud-native language which aims to make it easier to write microservices that integrate APIs. They talked about the creation of the language and how it was inspired by so many technologies, cloud native features like built-in container support, serverless-friendly, observability, and how it works with, or without, a service mesh — just to name a few.

Johannes Schickling (Founder of Graphcool) joined the show to talk about GraphQL — an application layer query language from Facebook. We talked about what it is, where it makes sense to use it, its role in serverless architectures, getting docs for free via Schemas and Types, and the community that’s rallying around this new way to think about APIs.

Ahmad Nassri from Mashape joined the show to talk about Kong, an open-source management layer for APIs and Microservices.