It’s March already, time to summarize February!
#APIs trainings
I did a small company-wide training about APIs. Here is the main deck and supplementary deck left from dev lunch&learn. Anyone is free to use it and if you have questions just ping me somewhere. They don’t have notes, so can be pretty cryptic, but I am inclined to continue improving them to use for new hires.
The most important feedback was from members of marketing and tech writing teams. I failed to properly address “why’s” and they felt a bit lost. Which is a great reminder that by being constantly in the “dev soup,” you falsely assume that everyone understands how immense APIs’ power and impact are.
#Readings
Government of Canada published standards on APIs. Not perfect, but it’s great to see not only corporates showing their development practices but also the public sector.
Curity suggested a simple “API security maturity model. All models are wrong, but some are useful, including this one.
While “Why we need to get rid of thought leaders” article by Adam Knight makes interesting points, I actually hoped it to cover “the leaders” problem. And this segues us to the next section…
#Leaders and their followers
Perhaps I’m stating the obvious fact, but here it is: do not ever assume that appreciating content created by the person correlates with wanting to be/stay a part of their community. Because true meanings are shown in the interactions between the leader and the followers.
As I still have respect and hope for innovations from those people, I will keep it general. There are two communities, both sparkled by well-known persons. I was eager to join both and quickly enough found them almost at odds. And while one is chill and mildly sarcastic about it, the other keeps being almost aggressive. The biggest problem with the second community for me is that the most vocal followers act as non-debatable intellectuals who paint everything in absolutes and this behavior is supported by their leaders. Well. You never know until you dive in.