APIs Can Give An Honest View Of What A Company Does

One of the reasons I enjoy profiling APIs is that they give an honest view of what a company does, absent of all the marketing fluff, and the promises that I see from each wave of startups. If designed right, APIs can provide a very functional, distilled down representation of data, content, and algorithmic resources of any company. Some APIs can be very fluffy and verbose, but the good ones are simple, concise, and straight to the point.

As I'm profiling the APIs for the companies included in my API monitoring research, what API Science, Apica, API Metrics, BMC Software, DataDog, New Relic, and Runscope offer quickly become pretty clear. A simple list of valuable resources you can put to use when monitoring your APIs. Crafting an OpenAPI Spec allows me to define each of these companies APIs, and easily articulate what it is that they do--minus all the bullshit that often comes with the businesses side of all of this. 

I feel like the detail I include for each company in an APIs.json file provides a nice view of the intent behind an API, while the details I put into the OpenAPI Spec provide insight into whether or not a company actually has any value behind this intent. It can be frustrating to wade through the amount of information some providers feel they need to publish as API documentation, but it all becomes worth it once I have the distilled down OpenAPI Spec, giving an honest view of what each company does.