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VOOZH | about |
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VOOZH | about |
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Building, testing and deploying your own code can be painful, especially when you’re under tight deadlines and a limited budget. Collaboration and standardization must be part of that process, and we need to work together so that developers can stay in their inner development loop longer without disrupting their flow.
But time and time again, I see tools that claim to be “dev-first” or to focus on developer experience but that are so convoluted, expensive, complex or abstracted to the point of hand-holding (think “low code” software as a service [SaaS]).
API development is no exception. I’d argue APIs are probably even worse off, as they’ve been an afterthought throughout their rise to becoming the “backbone of modern applications” and given their tendency to proliferate.
According to the apidays API Industry State of the Market report, 41% of companies have more APIs than apps. What’s more, F5 predicts that by 2030, we will have 2 billion APIs with a one-year shelf life. Meanwhile, Salt says 95% of companies have experienced API vulnerabilities in production.
To get API development — or the future of innovation — right, we must have the right tools to do the job. You can’t manage your way into API quality and consistency; you have to develop it.
How do we make development productive and rewarding? Can we revive a model that gives developers the satisfaction of accomplishing their goal and not dreading the journey? Can we help developers avoid wading through endless cryptic docs, or swearing at an interface that repeats the same “easy” action, but not the one they want?
One of the reasons I (and many other developers, I’m sure) got into development as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 20-something was that I always reveled in a challenge. (I started coding at age 8; that’s how much I loved it.) I wanted to solve problems, I wanted to “crack the code” and I regularly sought out cool technology and tools that made the experience better. And on the flip side, I didn’t want something so arduous, manual and painful that it sucked the fun out of development either. I needed a balanced middle ground, and I desperately sought harmony.
And after several years focused in the API space with a front-row view of the mess, I realized a vision for an API development tool that struck that balance. I wanted the fun and challenge, but I also wanted the speed and agility to innovate and deploy quickly. This year, my team took on this adventure with me, and we created something that I think meets this challenge.
Blackbird, which entered general availability on Oct. 2, 2024, is an API development platform that helps developers quickly and thoughtfully produce high-quality APIs. We designed it to support developers without getting in their way, oversimplifying complex tasks or insulting their intelligence.
As apidays said in its report, “New tools like Blackbird from Ambassador have been able to enhance API design practices and speed up some of the more tedious tasks required when working through an API design process and converting outputs into an OpenAPI definition.”
These tools capitalize on AI and temporary production-like environments to decrease cloud spend and increase optimization. They also mean spending less time doing manual, boring work and more time innovating on things that got you excited to be a developer in the first place. If you want to see how it works, create an account and give it a try.
As we look to the year ahead, here are my thoughts on what’s going to impact the future of development.
It bears repeating: You can’t manage your way into API quality and consistency; you have to develop it. Developing an API begins with creating a spec — essentially a blueprint of not only what an API needs to do but how it needs to be coded to work as intended. API management looks at ensuring users can access the API as intended, but the core responsibility lives in code writing and standardization.
Consistency doesn’t stop at the standards and documentation process. It also involves a consistent approach to mocking and testing your APIs to ensure quality and security throughout the entire API lifecycle.
The Buddha taught that everything is temporary and nothing in the universe is essential. Impermanence has always been a trend, but I think in the development world, we are seeing a greater move to serverless architectures and a desire for temporary, prod-like environment spin-ups. Developers no longer want to have to call up their infrastructure team to spin up a new production environment just to test an API or two. Being able to spin up temporary environments means your devs are happy and testing, and your infra team is unbothered. It also decreases the amount of tech debt that all companies, large and small, have to deal with.
AI is the next gold rush, and everyone has been grabbing quickly for their piece of the pie. The market is flooded with “AI-this” and “LLM-that,” but many tools are just fancy ChatGPT wrappers. Many have worried that AI will come for development jobs, but the more important thing is to have balance — “a middle ground where AI can help assist developers improve their API design,” as apidays wrote in its report.
For one example of how this “to AI or not AI” will play out, API spec generation can now be done almost completely using AI tools. You no longer have to write your specs because they’re already out there. Use the time you save on spec generation for the more exciting parts of your development day.
As the new year rapidly approaches, tech leaders need to focus on spending less, producing more (an age-old dichotomy) and trying to make it fun along the way. When cloud spending goes down, and your developers feel empowered rather than exasperated, everyone’s happy. Infusing with the right technology, embracing the temporariness of it all and ensuring consistency in all that you do is the way to get there.
To learn more about my vision, come and talk to me at API World in November, where I’m looking forward to assessing other 2025 API trends.
