Going Hard on Paid API Consulting & Writing

Focusing far too hard on my charity Protect Earth instead of doing enough paid work, and continuing the trend of learning the Dutch business tax system the hard way, means I've been frantically trying to work as hard as possible throughout November and December. I've really enjoyed the work I've got, but I need more.

Writing

I write here and for APIs You Won't Hate when I have time, but I never get to spend as much time as I'd like. These wonderful people hired me to really dig in, focus, and write the way I want to write, to create brilliant, unique content that will hover up SEO for them.

Working with the new Idempotency Keys RFC

Idempotency is when doing an operation multiple times is guaranteed to have the same effect as doing it just once. When working with APIs…

HTTP Toolkit

A brief introduction to OpenAPI

It’s hard to work on APIs without hearing about OpenAPI. OpenAPI is an API description format, which is essentially metadata that describes…

HTTP Toolkit

OpenAPI & AsyncAPI $ref: Advanced Guide · Bump.sh

After using OpenAPI or AsyncAPI for a while, you might notice your description documents have become a rather unwieldy mess of YAML and JSON. You end up with a whole lot of repetition, and this huge mess just loves to trigger merge conflicts as multiple developers change different things but Git seems none the wiser.

My Version of API Versioning is Better than Most - Phil Sturgeon

Phil Sturgeon writes about API Versioning and what are the common issues he encounters while working on various APIs.

Treblle BlogPhil Sturgeon

Meet Redocly CLI: The Modern OpenAPI Sidekick

Redocly CLI is a brilliant new tool from the folks who made ReDoc, the first beautiful API reference documentation tool powered by OpenAPI. This CLI tool goes a lot further than documentation, and helps with “linting” (automated API Style Guides), and solves the biggest problem that I had previously been

APIs You Won't HatePhil Sturgeon

Popular OpenAPI Bundling Tools Compared

When OpenAPI or JSON Schema documents get massive or repetitive, the contents can be split across multiple documents (on the filesystem, URLs, in memory somewhere) and joined together $ref. These split up API descriptions can then be joined back together as one document, with $ref pointing to an internal location

APIs You Won't HatePhil Sturgeon

There's loads more articles scheduled to come out over the next few weeks, but I'd love to keep a constantly stack of paid articles coming. We can publish on your blog, on APIs You Won't Hate, both (with canonical pointing to your blog so you benefit from SEO), it's up to you.

To get started just pre-pay for the article here, and you'll receive and invoice and a follow-up email to get your dream article written.

Consulting & Workshops

I've also been having a great time helping various companies and tooling vendors with API consulting. This can take so many forms, but it's just "Asking Phil to help with whatever."

• One company wanted help taking their API public, making it useable, prempting user complaints, learning how to document it brilliantly, and documenting my experiences as a new user struggling to figure out how it all worked so they could improve before launch.
• One company was releasing an OpenAPI-based mocking/sandboxing tool and wanted help aligning the product and marketing based off of my years of experience using all all the mocking tools and working on Prism.
• One company wanted their entire team to understand API First, API Design-First, and how to use API Governance in a way that wasn't just going to block them all from getting work done, so we set up a one-day workshop to train the team up.
• One company wanted to learn more about Green Software, so we got their whole team trained up and certified as Green Software Practitioners so they can all make the best decisions for the climate when building their software.

If you'd like to hire me for consulting we can book one or two hour sessions via the calendar. For more involved consulting or workships, you can book up whole days at a time for either online or in-person consulting, which will send you an invoice immediately, and I'll be in touch to schedule the next steps.

Special Offer for January 2023 - book at least one day and I'll come to wherever you are in Europe, as I've got an Interail pass and I'm taking a break from tree planting whilst my lungs recover from pneumonia then COVID-19 in the same month.

I'm excited to help share my knowledge with people, and sort out the financial hole I got stuck in spending too much time working on my charity and not enough time getting paid. The charity is going great, and we're continuing to scale our impact as we grow from 75,000 trees on over 60 farms, to taking out invasive species on council land, directly managing three amazing pieces of our own land in England and Wales, buying a fourth bit of land to work on not just reforestation but river rewiggling and wet meadow creation, and hiring more staff to be able to do more of all of this at once.

As always, anyone looking to support me and my wrok can grab a paid membership on this blog so I can continue to work on the Unf**king the Climate series and green tech.

Or if you want to hear more about API design and development subscribefor a paid membership on APIs You Won't Hate. We have been writing loads, ramping up the podcast, and I'm going to be doing more paid videos as more memberships come in.