Recently I have had a number of conversations with leaders in engineerings organizations about their initiatives and how they see new tools and processes fitting into them. There are a lot of ideas they want to try out, and a list of problems that need solving. Projects, companies, and best…

I’ve been thinking a lot about dirt. [waits for readers to leave] We find ourselves in an ever-more-complicated world. There are thousands of potential roles to play in society, up from a few dozen at the onset of the 20th century. There are supremely complex socio-technical systems that coordinate everything…

Last week, I had a conversation with Kin Lane and Mike Amundsen about Storytelling (watch here). At one point Mike mentioned that throughout human history, across most every civilization, there’s been a role for scribes, myth-holders and storytellers who held the stories and made sure they got shared. Stories have…

For new APIs, a design-first workflow is the way to go. Spending time up-front to design a good API contract and get feedback from consumers usually leads to a higher quality API being built. Many teams are interested in building new APIs design-first but it can be a daunting task…

It’s 2019, Microsoft is cool again, oh, and APIs still suck. Sure, there are some well documented and easy to use public APIs, but most of the APIs a developer works with on a daily basis are not documented, easy to learn, or fun to use. At Optic, we are…

Consistent APIs are easier to build, maintain, and (most importantly) consume. As the number of APIs continues to grow, it’s important to think about how we’re going to make the next 1 million APIs better than the last. How to change Developer Behavior Every day billions of lines of code are automatically linted by a…

…and how Optic built a better one When we set out to build better tooling for APIs, one of the first questions we had to ask ourselves was whether we should create our own API specification format or choose to interoperate with an existing standard. OpenAPI/Swagger has a lot of…

Most programmers work with APIs on a daily basis. And while there’s been an explosion of API tooling the last several years, very few teams have solid workflows for designing APIs, enforcing standards, keeping their specs up to date, and generating / deploying SDKs. We’ve seen massive benefits on teams…

Like any field, the domain of software development has a rich and interesting ontology. It’s easy to forget that the whole history of modern programming could fit within a human lifespan. …