API Transit Basics
I have been taking my research on APIs and organizing it in different ways to help the companies, organizations, institutions, and government agencies I consult with better understand what I've historically called the "API Life Cycle". In 2018, I'm pushing forward a variety of approaches to sharing my very robust, and detailed research as subway maps, which I'm calling API transit. My API transit work is meant to help API providers learn about the different aspects of the API journey they are on, in a more structured way.
I'm playing with some simple API transit maps to begin with, outlining a handful of stops that are common my clients journeys. These API transit lines are meant to help API providers get more organized about how they do APIs, but in future editions I will be adding more detail, as well as mapping out actual APis I'm applying this process to. To begin, you can click on the label for any of the stops below, or just begin by clicking here.
This project runs using Jekyll, which is completely hosting using Github Pages. All the data, and content is stored as Siren hypermedia as a Jekyll collection. You can access the Github repository for the project, and find the lifecycle details stored within the underscore lifecycle collection. I am just using Jekyll as a hypermedia client to walk through each stop along the life cycle, with the subway map as a visual aid.
I am working on future versions of this API transit map against possibly thousands of stops, spanning over a hundreds lines, providing a wealth of detail that can be applied to the API life cycle, something that can be simplified, or delivered in complete form, depending on the goal of an organization. If you are interested in producing an API Transit map for your API operations, or would like an API governance strategy laid out in this way, let me know--I am happy to discuss.
