Recent content on Bruno Pedro
Seedcamp (LP): Europe’s seed fund, 2023–now Blokness (Advisor): Reliable, real-time NFT data, 2022–now Nubentos (Investor): the API Marketplace For Health, 2020–2023 Landbot (Advisor): A SaaS platform that enables companies to create memorable conversational experiences, 2019–2021 Fleksy (Advisor): The easiest and fastest content access while typing on a mobile device, 2018–2019 Hitch…
Open-source projects # postman-openapi-sync , 2021–now express-glitch-keepalive , 2018–now node-fs , 2011–now intercom-php, 2013–2014 Horde Template compilation code (used by the IMP Webmail Client), November 2006 PEAR Auth_Container_SOAP , 2003–now ProFTPD Quota LDAP Module , May 2003 phdwait (PHP Database Web Application Toolkit), September 2002
This post was originally published on the Postman blog as “Translating user benefits into API capabilities” . The original content was professionally edited. As part of my ongoing work designing the Postman Open Technologies Knowledge Base API , I have identified most of the technical characteristics of the API. Now I need to define the capabilities that the API will offer. I’ve been following our…
This post was originally published on the Postman blog as “How to choose between REST vs. GraphQL vs. gRPC vs. SOAP” . The original content was professionally edited. To create the Postman Open Technologies Knowledge Base API , I’ve been following our team’s internal API design playbook, which covers the strategy, definition, validation, and specification of an API. After finishing the strategy…
This post was originally published on the Postman blog as “What I learned from interviewing potential users before designing an API” . The original content was professionally edited. I’ve been working on the Postman Open Technologies Knowledge Base project with the goal of implementing the Knowledge Base API . I’ve followed the API design steps we use internally: strategy, definition,…
This post was originally published on the Postman blog as “Build a successful API by understanding user personas” . The original content was professionally edited. Postman Open Technologies Knowledge Base is a new project with the goal of providing insights from a vast amount of information about APIs available on the internet. One of the project’s objectives is to provide an API that…
OpenAI ’s approach with their plugins strategy is a lesson to every founder trying to build a platform. OpenAI announced their ChatGPT plugins offer on March 23, 2023. Their announcement blog post says they “are gradually rolling out plugins in ChatGPT so we can study their real-world use, impact, and safety and alignment challenges.” They’re launching the plugin platform…
Tim Rogers , a Product Manager at GitHub, recently announced that they are moving from incremental API versioning to something they’re calling “calendar-based.” The announcement explains what calendar-based versioning is and why GitHub is adopting it now. Calendar-based versioning allows GitHub to introduce breaking changes regularly without upsetting API consumers. Consumers…
Sharing information between different features can be done in a synchronous or asynchronous fashion. Following an asynchronous communication style doesn’t mean that you’re sharing events. You can, for instance, pass commands between features. By doing so, you’re creating a strong functional dependency between features. To avoid that, you should instead share information about things that happened,…
API User Experience or, in short, APIUX is the experience that any user interacting with your API will feel. It includes not only the developers writing code that integrates with your API but also end users that are using your API indirectly through third-party applications. As you will see, the way you design your API has a profound impact in the way even end users experience an application that…
Immediacy is a concept that is often not easy to grasp. Most people think of immediacy as something related to what is happening around them when, in fact, the main factor of immediacy is that they are actively involved. Immediacy is considered to be the direct and instant involvement with something. Being involved with something means that you are also participating and possibly affecting the…
The world is full of messages, but we don’t realize that until we stop long enough to pay attention. How so? Look at how people interact with each other. What are they doing and saying? How are they communicating? Are they expecting some sort of feedback from one another? Humans are hardwired to expect others to communicate using messages. Even though most of our communication is non-verbal,…
The platform economy is growing more robust than ever. According to McKinsey , in 2025, digital platforms will be accountable for over 30% of the whole economy. In their 2018 article, they mention that by 2025 “an emerging set of digital ecosystems could account for more than $60 trillion in revenue.” However, only about 3% of global companies have already adopted a platform strategy.…
If you’re building or growing a platform business, you will face the challenge of understanding how you can enable a two-sided market. Two-sided markets are important because they are the engines that will make your platform grow without your intervention. (…) for a platform business, user commitment and active usage , not sign-ups or acquisitions, are the true indicators of customer…
What makes you really happy about your work? I ask this question during most of my interviews. Candidates feel surprised with the question and try their best to express what really makes them happy about work. I like to think that I ask that question so I can better understand them and, especially, what drives them. That way I can decide if they are a fit for what I’m looking for and, if so,…
Yesterday I published a tweet asking people that consider themselves API Designers what their job consists of. It’s interesting to see that I’ve got a bunch of answers but not the ones I was looking for. The thing to note is that most people who believe they work in API Design are actually working on technical API definition, not on designing the API from the ground up. Their job…
This post was originally published on Hacker Noon as “What are Web APIs” . In this article, I will introduce you broadly to the topic of Web APIs. I will start by explaining what APIs are, how they evolved into Web APIs, and how developers like yourself can use them. Then we will outline the history of Web APIs along the numerous different approaches that took place over the years.
This article is a satire that describes what often happens to developers that are looking for an API and want to integrate with it. I’m pretty sure that some of the things have happened to you at some point in time. If you’re an API provider, you should think hard about how you’re dealing with the five topics that I’m about to expose. 1. Search # It all starts with search. You want to find an API…
The concept of friction in products and applications is not something new and can be experienced by almost everyone. Product friction is represented by all the barriers and difficulties people find when trying to use a product. Every Web site that makes you fill in a form, or wait for a confirmation e-mail, or take some test to prove that you are human is adding friction — and losing sales. —…
This article summarizes a talk I recently gave at the Nordic APIs Platform Summit in Stockholm, Sweden. The full title of the presentation is “Growing your business with an API: how to measure your success” and it explores the idea that you should be able to measure how your API is contributing to your business revenue. Introduction # How can you grow your business revenue by using…
What is an interface? Is it something that a user sees on a screen? Is it the border between different elements? Is it a way to get to some other place? An interface is the common boundary of two entities . It’s the place where independent entities communicate with each other . Interface. A common boundary of two entities. Interfaces are everywhere. When you walk and feel the floor beneath your…
This post was originally published on the Hitch blog as “GraphQL: 3 reasons not to use it” . GraphQL is a query language created by Facebook in 2012. Its purpose is to describe the capabilities and requirements of data models for client-server applications. Facebook has been using GraphQL ever since and it has been open sourced in 2015. Its specification is evolving in the form of a Draft RFC .…
API Discovery is the process of finding the right API that meets your needs. What is the best way to automate it? Machine-readable definitions let your software discover which APIs to use. One such definition format is APIs.json. It lets you group several APIs together and point to other machine-readable documents. Each of those documents defines things such as pricing, license agreements, and…
As you add microservices to your stack, the number of connections follows Metcalfe’s law . In the simplest case, there’s just a single connection between two services. As you reach five services, connections can happen in 10 different ways. A stack with twenty services has 190 possible connections. The complexity of managing, supporting, and understanding those connections is something you should…
You can think of API testing as a mix of different strategies, each having its own purpose. Unit testing is all about making sure that your code consumes the API in a reliable way. Functional , or black box testing, lets you know how the API replies to specific requests. Load testing follows the functional testing patterns making repeated API calls, measuring response times. API Testing…
Generally speaking, you can define latency as the time delay between the cause and the effect of some change in the system being observed . In a point to point communication, you calculate latency as the time it takes to get a response from the system. When you involve many services in a single workflow then the latency is the sum of all the response times. Latency in Microservices. Latency is the…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “API Lifecycle Operations Stage: Marketing Your API” . By reading this article you’ll understand what factors make up the API Lifecycle Operations Stage , and how you should address them. Transforming your API into something developers will want to consume, and learning what impact this will have on your business are things we’ll…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “API Lifecycle Development Stage: Deploying Your API” . During the course of this article, you’ll come to understand the actions to take as well as the most important challenges to address during an API’s Development phase. We’ll consider what implementation options are available and explore API Management and why it matters. We’ll…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “Common Cases When Using SOAP Makes Sense” . These days when discussing web APIs, a RESTful approach is usually assumed. While this modern architectural paradigm is often used, it isn’t always the best tact depending on the job at hand. The fact is that SOAP is still being used quite a lot today. While not all problems can be elegantly…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “Using Templates for Documentation Driven API Design” . As an API provider it’s important to consider how consumers interact with your API. While most people leave this task to the very end, API design should, in fact, begin with clear and concise documentation. This practice is often called “Documentation Driven Design” or…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “Is REST better than SOAP? Yes, in Some Use Cases” . What is REST? What about SOAP? Why were they created and what are their main features? What makes them different, and when should you use one or the other? We gave an overview of REST vs. SOAP in our recent infographic, but this post delves deeper. Read on for answers to these…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “Designing APIs for Machines” . The number of Internet-connected devices is growing at an astonishing rate. According to Cisco, in 2012, there were about 8.7 billion connected devices! In 2013 alone more than 280 thousand new devices were connected every hour, on average. This year, that number grew to more than 360 thousand new devices…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “Designing APIs for Humans” . One of the most discussed topics at this year’s NordicAPIs Platform Summit was API Design and how it can affect the way APIs are consumed. The discussions focussed on how design might affect the end users’ perception of your product. A number of speakers considered this a very important topic, and several…
This post was originally published on the ZDNet Service Oriented blog as “How to stay ahead of third-party API changes” . While most developers know that APIs change all the time, those changes aren’t communicated as often or as clearly as they should. Usually you only find out about what changed when it’s already too late – and the only choice you have is to react by adapting your…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “How to Spark API Adoption With Good Documentation Practices” . While almost everyone seems to agree that documentation is of key importance when launching an API, little is said about how it can actually affect API adoption. Jeffrey Hammond , a Principal Analyst at Forrester, claims that “adoption patterns are shifting towards…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “How to Release a Free API and Get Paid Indirectly” . API-related business models usually involve a customer actively paying to use the API itself. But consider this: What if you could allow anyone to use your API freely while you retain the power to generate revenue from it? And what if by doing so, you could actually increase your…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “How to Achieve Accelerated Growth with APIs” . Growth is a word on every entrepreneur’s mind, especially when it’s associated with the value of a startup, or with how much profit it can generate. Most startups struggle, and apply many different techniques, to reach a point where they can show some growth. This article shows you how…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “API Design & Testing State of the Art” . Ensuring proper APIs functionality raises all the following questions: How do you decide which endpoints you’re going to expose with your API? How do you create all the documentation that developers will use to interact with your API? What is the best way to verify that your API is working as…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “5 Reasons Why Developers are not Using your API” . Have you launched your API and are you having a hard time understanding why it’s not being used as much as you anticipated? You’ve followed all the best practices, used all the latest technologies and have made sure it is always up and running. For some reason developers are not using…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “Should you Control How your Public API is Used?” . The more open your public API is the more developers will implement different types of applications. Some of these, however, might be ones that you would prefer not to be associated with your brand. What is the right balance between openness and governance? Should you relinquish some…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “How to Monetize Your API” . You’ve spent countless hours working on your new API. You followed all the standards and best practices. You executed an API-first strategy. You listened to your app’s users and to developers. You were careful to include the features they needed. One thing you have not yet figured out though is how you will…
This post was originally published on the Nordic APIs blog as “5 Ways APIs will Increase your Revenue” . What is the most important thing your business needs? Cash! And how do you get cash? Customers! Without customers, there is no revenue, and the ability to acquire customers is what distinguishes a successful business from a failing one. In this article, I will show you five ways to increase…
Is Product Hunt the next big thing?
An old friend just sent me a scan of the business card of my first job. Thanks!
I recently gave a talk at the APIdays Mediterranea in Madrid where I started with a question: “ Who are your customers? ”. The single, most important thing you want to understand about your API is how you can generate revenue from it. It all depends on who your customers are and how they can obtain value through your API. What customers need is represented in one of the slides as the…
Great article by Steve Graham about why you should stop using HTTP Basic Auth immediately! As well as being tremendously simple, HTTP Basic by itself is also tremendously insecure, i.e. it is implemented by simply Base64 encoding the username and password concatenated with a colon “:” character. It then follows that HTTP Basic should only be used, if at all, over securely encrypted…
“Who’s using your API” was the title of my presentation at the API Strategy & Practice Conference that happened on February 21 and 22, 2013 in New York City. One of the conference takeaways was the concern that almost everybody had with their customers. Almost everyone I talked with was in one way or another worried about how the API distribution model is affecting the way their…