Podcasts

Podcasts are the long-form, conversational, intimate channel of API evangelism — the place where the human voice and the unhurried conversation build a kind of trust and authority that written content and short social posts can’t quite reach. There’s something about audio, about hearing a person think out loud and converse genuinely over thirty or sixty minutes, that creates connection. The API space has had a rich podcast culture over the years, and I’ve been both a consumer and a producer of it, because the podcast does something distinctive in the evangelism toolbox: it lets the audience spend real time with the ideas and the people, building the kind of relationship and credibility that come from sustained, genuine conversation rather than from broadcast. Podcasts are evangelism at the pace of a real conversation, and that pace is part of their power.

Podcasts have been part of the API community’s fabric for as long as I’ve been doing this. The early shows — Traffic and Weather with John Sheehan and Steve Marx, which I wrote about starting in 2013 — were developer-friendly, conversational explorations of APIs and cloud that helped the community make sense of an evolving space. APIs Uncensored from SmartBear, where I had a conversation about my subway map API in 2015, and In the Mood for HTTP with Darrel Miller and Glenn Block, which I praised in 2015 for its Q&A educational format, were part of a growing ecosystem of audio content that served the community as genuine knowledge sources. I tracked these as the sources of API knowledge expanded beyond blogs into YouTube, SoundCloud, and podcasts — recognizing that audio was becoming an important channel for how the community learned and connected. The podcast was, from early on, a legitimate and valued part of how the API conversation happened.

The podcast’s place in the evangelism toolbox is as a distinct channel with distinct strengths, and I’ve always included it. When I cataloged the common building blocks of evangelism in 2019, audio was among the channels, and in my evangelism toolbox I’ve consistently treated podcasts and audio as a category alongside written and video content. The specific strength of the podcast is depth and humanity: where a blog post conveys information and a tweet conveys a moment, a podcast conveys a person and a relationship over time. The listener spends real time with the host and guests, hears their reasoning, gets to know their thinking, and develops a sense of trust that’s hard to build any other way. For evangelism, which is fundamentally about authentic relationship and earned credibility, the podcast is an unusually effective medium because it’s so well-suited to conveying genuineness. You can’t fake your way through an hour of unscripted conversation the way you can polish a written post.

Breaking Changes is the podcast I’m proudest of, and producing it taught me a lot about the medium’s power. I wrote in 2024 about being very proud of the Breaking Changes podcast — roughly 150 episodes produced during my time at Postman, covering products, governance, diversity, enterprise, startups, and the honest realities of the API space. Producing that many episodes was a sustained body of evangelism work, and the themes I explored — honesty, diversity, the real challenges of the API business — reflect what the podcast medium is good for: substantive, honest, long-form conversation about things that matter. The legacy of Breaking Changes, as I reflected on it, was a genuine contribution to the API community’s understanding of itself, built one conversation at a time. The podcast let me have the kind of deep, exploratory conversations with practitioners that surface insights you can’t get from a quick interview or a written exchange.

The conversational format has become central to how I do evangelism, and the podcast medium keeps evolving with me. I launched API Evangelist Conversations in 2024 as a low-production, feedback-loop-oriented interview format — focused on genuine conversations with API producers and consumers rather than high production values. The point was to make the conversation, the genuine exchange, the focus, rather than the polish. By 2026 these had become weekly conversations, a recurring evangelism rhythm. And the partnership with Fourcast Media and LeTroy Gardner in 2025 to produce a new, higher-quality API podcast focused on integration and consumption reflects the ongoing belief that audio conversation is a valuable evangelism channel worth investing in. The format keeps adapting — sometimes low-production and intimate, sometimes higher-production and polished — but the core remains the genuine conversation.

The deeper reason I value podcasts is that they embody the conversational, relationship-driven heart of authentic evangelism better than almost any other medium. I’ve argued for years that the most important evangelism work is conversation — genuine, two-way, human exchange — and the podcast is conversation made shareable and durable. It takes the thing that makes evangelism work, the real human conversation, and lets it reach an audience beyond the people in the room. When I curate the API podcasts worth listening to, as I did in 2025 — Breaking Changes, APIs Uncensored, In the Mood for HTTP, and others — I’m pointing the community toward the conversations that have served it well, because these podcasts collectively are part of how the API community thinks out loud and learns together. The podcast is evangelism that respects the audience’s intelligence enough to spend real time with them, that builds trust through sustained genuine conversation rather than through broadcast, and that conveys the humanity of the people doing this work in a way no other medium quite matches. In an evangelism practice built on authenticity and genuine relationship, the podcast is the channel that most fully embodies those values — the unhurried, honest, human conversation, made available to anyone who wants to listen. That’s why, across more than a decade and many shifts in format and platform, the podcast has remained one of my most valued evangelism channels.

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