Breaking the Build Episode 05 - Talk with Kin Lane - The API Evangelist and host Brenton House

This is Brenton House, and welcome to a special episode of Breaking the Build, where we are going to be on-site in San Jose, California for API World. So buckle up, make sure you have your passport, because this week we’re going to California.

Welcome to Breaking the Build, I am your host Brenton House. Once again today we are at API World in San Jose. Today we have the special opportunity to talk to the API Evangelist, Kin Lane. Now, if you’re not familiar with Kin Lane, he has been providing resources and help for API developers for over a decade. I personally used his resources, and it’s really helped me as an API developer. So Kin Lane is now the chief evangelist for Postman. Now, Postman is an essential tool if you’re an API developer, but it’s also essential to whatever you are consuming, APIs, so that’s pretty much everybody. Postman is a tool that you consume APIs, you can then see the request, the body, you can see all the information about it. So this is great if you’re developing and changing things in your API, you can see, making sure that everything works right. But if you’re also consuming a third-party API, you can make sure that you’re getting the information that you’re supposed to be getting. But enough of me talking, let’s sit down with Kin Lane and ask him some questions. So join me as we go inside and we talk to Kin Lane about APIs and his role at Postman.

Let’s start with who I am. My name is Kin Lane, I’m API Evangelist and chief evangelist for Postman. So I spent the last 10 years studying the technology, the politics, and the business of doing APIs, and most recently I’m helping do this for Postman.

Let’s talk a little bit about, what’s an API?

An API is an acronym for application programming interface, and it’s how application systems talk to each other and share data. So real simply, websites and web browsers are for humans, and APIs are for other systems, and that’s how pretty much everything is built these days, from our web applications to our mobile phones to our televisions, our cars, and pretty much anything that we’re connecting to the internet these days.

Let’s talk a little bit about Postman and what it is and how it helps.

So Postman started as an API client. So what Postman does, it lets you make calls to APIs without needing to code. So it’s kind of become this favorite tool of developers to be able to quickly make API calls, requests, and see the response without actually having to write code. So that’s why it’s kind of become a popular tool for developers, but it’s also starting to be used by non-developers, because developers can make an API call, set it all up with all the technical details, and then they can share it with anyone, another developer or another business user, and then that user can just click run and it’ll run exactly as that developer set it up to execute. So it really makes for a nice, portable, shareable kind of unit of representation of what an API is. And you can get a lot crazier with that, but that’s really the basics of what Postman is and what it does. Additionally, you can make requests and you can also connect API requests together. So you can add something to a database using one API request, you can then have the second one request that back and get more details about it. So you can really connect many different API calls together. And what’s really cool about this is it doesn’t have to be the same API, so you can pull something from Twitter and you can send it via an SMS using the Twilio API. So it really makes something that’s really useful for developers to begin orchestrating and putting APIs to work, and really trying to accomplish real-world business objectives with APIs in a way that makes sense to developers and potentially non-developers.

Craziest APIs?

I mean, it depends on what your definition of crazy is. So yeah, crazy APIs, I mean, I would start with Twitter. Twitter is one of the craziest APIs I know out there, as far as what it’s built on, the bots, the automation, what it does, how it impacts a business, impacts elections, impacts government. It’s really a pretty crazy API as far as what’s possible, and I think it’s one of the most relevant representations of what an API can do for anybody who’s looking to learn about APIs, or anybody who’s really even an advanced API user and just looking to play with what’s possible and understand the complexities of running APIs at scale. Because, you know, they’ve got policy, automation policies, how and what people can do or should do with an API, a lot of examples there. But if you wanted to go a little more crazier, I would say the NASA near-Earth asteroid API, that will give you updates and tell you when asteroids are about to hit, comets are coming close to the earth. If you want to really get nervous, if it’s not stressful enough, the NASA near-Earth asteroid API is pretty crazy.

Definitely, APIs are kind of the back door of the web. Everybody has them, every website, Twitter, Facebook, Google, most devices we’re connecting to the internet, our refrigerators have APIs, Alexa voice inside of our houses have APIs, our cars have APIs. And so if you’re really wanting to get crazy, just start looking for APIs out there under any topic that interests you, and I think you’ll be surprised at what you find.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Breaking the Build, and special thanks to Kin Lane for being our guest on the show. I’m Brenton House, your host, and until next time, keep coding strong.