Evangelism

Evangelism is the word my entire career is built on, and after fifteen years I’m more convinced than ever that it was the right word — not a marketing euphemism, not an accident, but a precise description of what this work actually is. I started API Evangelist in 2010 because I saw that web APIs were becoming vital to the growth of the internet and the economy, and that almost nobody outside a small circle of developers understood why. The gap between how important APIs were becoming and how few people understood them was the gap I set out to close. That’s evangelism: carrying a message you believe in to people who haven’t heard it yet, and doing the patient, repetitive, faithful work of helping them understand. The technology was never the point. The understanding was the point. Evangelism is the practice of spreading that understanding and earning adoption through genuine belief rather than through a sales pitch.

What is API Evangelist, the question I answered formally in 2012, is really the question of what evangelism is. I defined the role around the business of APIs rather than the technical dogma — because the developers already had the technology covered, and what was missing was someone translating the value to the business, nonprofit, and government leaders who controlled whether APIs would actually get built and adopted. The mission, which I stated in 2012 and have restated many times since, was to be an independent, unbiased voice — providing resources and education without a vendor agenda, without something to sell. That independence is central to what made the evangelism credible. I wasn’t evangelizing a product. I was evangelizing an idea — that APIs matter, that they should be done well, and that everyone affected by them deserved to understand them. The day-to-day work, as I described it in 2013, was monitoring thousands of APIs, tracking hundreds of API blogs, and synthesizing all those signals into stories and resources that helped people make sense of a fast-moving space.

The choice of the word “evangelism” was deliberate, and I’ve defended it explicitly because people regularly suggest I should have used something softer. I wrote in 2019 that I’m happy I chose the term evangelism — over “advocacy,” over “relations,” over the more corporate-comfortable alternatives — because technology genuinely operates as a religion in our world. People hold beliefs about technology with the fervor of faith; they convert, they proselytize, they have orthodoxies and heresies. Naming my work evangelism was an honest acknowledgment of that reality. And in 2020 I went further, writing simply “I am an evangelist” — engaging directly with the religious meaning of the word, the conversion work, the faith dimension. Evangelism in its original sense is bringing good news, and I did and do believe APIs are, on balance and when done right, good news — a way to give people access, agency, and understanding. But the faith framing also carries a responsibility, which is that an evangelist who believes uncritically becomes a propagandist. The honest evangelist believes in the message while staying clear-eyed about its abuses.

That clear-eyed quality is why I’ve insisted that evangelism is also a performance, and why I’ve been candid about the moral purpose underneath it. I wrote in 2017 that API Evangelist is a performance rooted in personality — a deliberate, crafted, public persona meant to cut through the noise, counterbalance Silicon Valley’s spin, and push back on exploitative API practices and the politics of the space. The performance isn’t fakery; it’s the necessary theater of getting a message heard in a crowded, hype-saturated industry. But underneath the performance is a serious purpose that I reminded myself of in 2017 when I wrote about why I do API Evangelist: I don’t evangelize because I think APIs are universally good. I evangelize to ensure observability into the systems that increasingly impact human lives. The deepest reason for the evangelism is that APIs are how power operates in the digital world, and if more people understand them, more people can see and contest that power. Evangelism, at its most serious, is a democratic project — spreading the literacy that lets people understand the systems governing their lives.

Evangelism is equal parts internal, partner, and public outreach, and getting that balance right is one of the most practical things I’ve taught. I wrote in 2011 that effective API evangelism is roughly one-third internal, one-third partner, and one-third public — because an evangelist who only does the glamorous public-facing work, the conference talks and the blog posts, is missing two-thirds of the job. The internal evangelism — convincing your own organization, winning over the stakeholders who control the data and the budgets — is often the hardest and most important. I mapped out four phases of internal evangelism in 2019, because converting your own colleagues moves through predictable stages of resistance before it reaches adoption. The partner evangelism builds the ecosystem. The public evangelism spreads the word. All three are evangelism; only one of them looks like it from the outside. And in an API-driven company, as I wrote in 2012, everyone becomes an evangelist — the mindset spreads until it’s not a single person’s job but a shared organizational way of thinking.

The practice of evangelism has concrete, repeatable building blocks, and I demystified them deliberately because evangelism can seem like an ineffable talent when it’s actually a craft you can learn. I catalogued the common building blocks of evangelism in 2019: blog posts, social media, Q&A, email, meetup talks, conference talks, webinars, images, video, audio, tutorials, white papers, guides, code repositories, proofs of concept, prototypes, and collections. These are the formulaic, repeatable units of the work — not magic, just consistent production across many formats and channels. My personal evangelism algorithm, which I shared in 2023, and my evangelism toolbox, which I refined in 2024, made the structure even more explicit: priority topics, the channels you reach people through, the hands-on artifacts you produce, the workspaces where the work lives, and the metrics that measure real impact beyond vanity counts. The point of revealing the algorithm was to demystify the craft — to show that evangelism is a discipline anyone willing to do the consistent work can practice, not a gift reserved for natural performers.

Storytelling is the heart of evangelism, the single most important tool, and I’ve never stopped saying so. Hacker storytelling, which I developed in 2012, was the recognition that the most persuasive evangelism combines real working artifacts with narrative — showing and telling together. I’ve written a regular reminder, year after year, that storytelling is the most important tool in your API toolbox, because the technology doesn’t sell itself and the spec doesn’t explain its own significance. A story does. The evangelist’s core skill is taking something abstract and technical and making it matter to a human being through narrative — through a story about what it enables, who it helps, what it changes. When I called in 2017 for more API evangelists and storytellers, I was naming the shortage that has always defined the space: there are never enough people who can bridge the technical and the human through story. Everything else in the evangelism toolbox serves the storytelling. The blog post, the talk, the demo, the prototype — they’re all vehicles for a story about why this matters.

The evolution of my own evangelism over fifteen years tells the story of the practice maturing, and I’ve been reflective about that arc. When I looked back in 2020 at ten years of API Evangelist, what struck me was how little had fundamentally changed — the landscape had scaled enormously but the core work was the same: helping people do APIs well and keeping the systems observable. My 2024 retrospective on how I got here traced the intellectual journey through HTTP APIs, management, discovery, specifications, consumers, experience, products, and governance — but the evangelism underneath all those topics was constant. The topics shift with the industry; the evangelism endures. And as the work moved toward community — toward my role as Chief Community Officer — the evangelism deepened into something more about stewardship than persuasion. The arc of fifteen years of evangelism bends from spreading awareness of a new thing toward tending a mature community and defending the values that made the thing worth evangelizing in the first place.

What evangelism comes down to, in the end, is belief joined to discipline joined to purpose. The belief is genuine — I actually think APIs matter, that they should be done well, and that more people understanding them makes the world a little more legible and a little more fair. The discipline is the craft — the building blocks, the storytelling, the consistent production across channels, the internal and partner and public work, the algorithm that turns belief into reliable practice. And the purpose is the moral core — the observability into systems that affect human lives, the literacy that lets people see and contest digital power, the democratic project of spreading understanding rather than hoarding it. Evangelism is carrying a message you believe in, to people who need to hear it, through patient and repeatable craft, in service of something larger than the message itself. I chose the word fifteen years ago and I’d choose it again. It’s the most honest description I have for the work of helping people understand the systems that increasingly run their world.

Guidance

API Learnings

APIs

API Governance

API Solutions

API Discovery

API Building Blocks

API Evangelist LLC

Evangelism

References

Guidance Details

Explore more

Discover APIs