API Evangelist Conversation with Bruno Vaz da Costa, API Architect (digital plumber) at RHI Magnesita

Hello again, this is Kin Lane, API Evangelist. I’m here for one of my API Evangelist conversations where I bring people who are doing interesting things with APIs to come chat about what they’re up to. So let’s not waste any time, let’s get started, see who we have here today. Welcome, who are you?

Pleasure to meet you. What do you do, Bruno?

Oh, the pleasure is mine. Well, I’m working as a system analyst, especially as an integration analyst. I work for RHI Magnesita, which is refractory products selling. So they build refractory products and sell them.

Yeah, I spent the last 30 minutes researching your industry, and there’s a lot of really interesting things which maybe we can talk about another time. I want to understand your perspective on why APIs matter.

Well, especially web APIs, they matter to me because they are, well, this is the marketing, the building blocks of the internet. But I like them especially because they help us to build different business and rebuild software that we’re building that’s actually crappy software, I’d say. So I like that because we are rebuilding the digital world.

Wow, I have to admit I’ve built a lot of crappy software in my day, and that is one of the reasons I love APIs, because I can keep reinventing myself every couple of years and get rid of the crappy stuff that I built before with the new, hopefully amazing stuff, but sometimes crappy. So what are your challenges with building APIs? What’s the hardest for you?

I think the governance is the hardest part. It’s hard to sell, not to developers, they understand, they are handling APIs every day, all the time. But for non-technical people, it’s hard to sell API governance, although many of them are doing some API governance when they are documenting an API, for instance, they are doing API governance stuff. But even though, it’s hard to sell, oh, we should talk about API design, we should talk about API versioning and other stuff. But I think governance, it’s a scary word, so it’s hard to sell, so it’s hard to get the buy-in and the whole stuff over. API governance, I think it’s the hardest part. And automating the API governance is also hard to do, when you have to learn new tools. Actually, I’m learning a new software, GitHub, GCP. When you are used to other tools, it’s hard to switch to other ones, but it’s part of the job. But definitely governance, it’s a big challenge.

You mentioned, when we first started talking, I invited you to join me, you talked about standardization and the role that standardizing APIs would be helpful in what you do for business but also in the governance. Can you tell me a little bit about what API standardization looks like in your industry?

Sure. Well, it’s kind of new in our industry. We are trying to adopt OpenAPI, and we have an issue when the company buys another company. The acquisition, it’s kind of easy, but the merge, it’s really, really hard. It takes months, maybe many years. And why? Because another company has some legacy applications that don’t stick well with our applications. So we are thinking about building our own standards to help the merge. So it’s like buying, but conceptually, it’s like buying, but in fact we are trying to build, actually to think about building, a framework that will help the merge when the company decides to buy another company in the same industry.

So why would your business want to do this? I mean, acquisition is one thing, but it sounds like you would enable your competitors potentially, or people to create new startups or new companies that could compete with you. Isn’t it something that would concern business leaders, or is it different from that?

It’s kind of different from that, because actually we wouldn’t build something like that to open source. So we would do that to help our board to buy another company. In the last year they bought, I think, three companies, one of them is in the United States. So the hard part is to integrate everything and manage the different applications. So under a unified framework, it will help to accelerate the merge. That’s the idea, basically.

And some of these APIs might be APIs you already use, like you mentioned SAP and stuff. Some companies are just going to be industry standards, kind of like Amazon, I guess S3 is kind of a standard for storage. But you’re going to need a lot of other standards that might be custom to your industry, right?

Sure, definitely. And most of the companies are on premises, so they don’t use a lot of cloud services. This is another, well, it’s not an issue, but you have to handle a lot of custom software. So that’s why standardization, we think it will be helpful.

Yeah, so people can still build custom solutions using common standards, that would make their work less when they have to build something, because they don’t have to reinvent it when they’re building it. Is that, sorry, is that on premise, is it because of regulation, business practices, like why is your industry very focused on on-premise solutions?

A good question. I think they are used to do everything on premises. Cloud computing is kind of new to them. So they are trying, actually my actual job is to help developers on modernizing their legacy apps, because everything is on premises. So they are modernizing it to migrate to cloud computing.

Interesting. How do you get people to care about APIs when they’re in an industry that isn’t really known for APIs, or APIs being popular? How do you get people to pay attention?

This is another hard part. Well, yeah, we try to think about all the business aspects. We don’t try to think about technical issues and other technical stuff. So when I say an API must do business representation, and they kind of, well, and how do I get the data? Well, this is the second part, this is the API backend. We don’t have to talk about technical aspects when we are talking about API design and other stuff that are related to governance. So let’s talk business, let’s talk about only business domain context, and everything else later on we talk about technical aspects. So I try to get them only to talk about business. It’s hard, because to some people it’s hard to abstract the business through API, but it takes time, but it’s then, yeah.

I think it’s equal parts. I’m trying to do the same, as far as focus on just talking about APIs in terms of business. That’s why I’m very happy to be talking to you and getting out of Silicon Valley kind of core tech companies, because I think this is really important and we need to be talking about real-world solutions that people care about that actually impact their day. But so I’m always trying to understand personally why and how people see APIs. So you personally, why are you interested in APIs, what keeps you coming to work every day?

Well, it’s been eight years I’ve been working with API management. Before that I used to work as a software developer and architect. So when I started to work with an API management solution, I thought, this is good, I don’t have to talk about strong, the dangerous or other parts of the software, I have room to think about the solution, the whole distributed system and how to connect those parts under the hood, and silently to developers to build other software over that IT infrastructure. So I think that’s the biggest incentive I have to keep working with APIs, building API infrastructure.

Yeah, I’m so with you. I’ve been a backend, frontend developer, I’ve been a manager, I’ve been a lot of things, and this intersection right now is, I think, where I’m going to spend the rest of my career. I agree with you and the reasons why. Well, I really appreciate it, Bruno. I appreciate you coming by and talking with me today, sharing your stories, and thank you very much, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

I appreciate, thank you very much.

Excellent. All right, I love it. This is exactly where I want this podcast to go, into these outside of Silicon Valley, outside the United States. I want to go directly into companies, global companies that are doing real business, and understand what it takes to get them thinking, caring about, and investing in APIs, so they can get to a place where governance of APIs matters. So anyways, very cool stuff. Well, thanks, I appreciate you tuning in, and until next time.