Workshops are one of the most effective forms of API evangelism and education there is, because they’re where abstract API concepts become hands-on, concrete skills. A workshop is a structured teaching session where people learn API skills directly — not by reading about them, not by watching a talk, but by doing the work with guidance, in a room (physical or virtual) with someone who can answer their questions and help them past the sticking points. I’ve run a lot of workshops over the years, for enterprises, governments, universities, and conferences, and I’ve come to see them as a uniquely powerful evangelism tool because they combine education, relationship-building, and hands-on practice in a way that few other formats do. A workshop doesn’t just tell people about APIs; it changes what they can actually do.
The complement to hackathons is where I first articulated the distinct value of workshops, and the distinction matters. I wrote in 2014 about workshops in addition to hackathons for your API — because while hackathons are great for generating excitement and exploration, they assume participants already have the skills to build. Workshops fill the gap before the hackathon: they’re structured learning environments, often with workbooks and direct engagement from the API team, where people actually acquire the skills. The hackathon is a competition; the workshop is a classroom. Both have their place, but the workshop is the one that builds capability, that takes someone from not knowing how to use an API to being able to. For evangelism, the workshop is the higher-leverage format, because it produces lasting skill rather than momentary excitement.
The unworkshop format I helped develop at conferences was a genuine innovation in collaborative API education. I wrote in 2014 about the Gluecon and APIStrat unworkshops — extended, multi-hour discussion sessions where API professionals worked through hard topics like IoT, API versioning, and design patterns together. The unworkshop wasn’t a lecture; it was a facilitated collaborative working session where the participants’ collective knowledge was the curriculum. This format recognized that for advanced practitioners, the most valuable learning happens in structured peer discussion rather than top-down instruction. The unworkshops were some of the richest learning environments in the API community, precisely because they treated the participants as contributors rather than just recipients. The format embodied the community-building dimension of workshops at its best.
The enterprise and lifecycle workshops are where workshops became serious organizational tools, and I built a real practice around them. I partnered with Streamdata.io to deliver API lifecycle workshops to enterprises, covering discovery, design, development, production, testing, and security — structured sessions that took organizations through the full API lifecycle hands-on. The design-focused and discovery-focused workshops I ran addressed specific lifecycle stages in depth. These enterprise workshops weren’t just education; they were organizational change tools, getting whole teams aligned on API practices through shared hands-on experience. The internal API curriculum and workshops I wrote about developing in 2017 — three tiers for beginners, partners, and trainers — were about building sustained internal capability rather than one-off training. The workshop, in the enterprise context, is how you move an organization’s API maturity forward in a concentrated, hands-on way that documents and talks alone can’t achieve.
The educational and institutional reach of workshops extended to universities and governments, which I found especially meaningful. The BYU API University workshop, which I wrote about in 2020, brought together over a hundred participants from twenty-plus universities to work through API usage and the emerging idea of personal APIs — academic API education at a serious scale. I participated in a two-day API workshop with the European Commission, studying public-sector API use. I ran API 101 workshops at APIStrat and API building-blocks workshops with Intel at Gartner. The range of these workshops — from undergraduates to EU policymakers to enterprise architects — reflects how adaptable the format is. A workshop can meet any audience where they are, at any level, and bring them forward through hands-on practice. That adaptability is part of why workshops are such a durable evangelism and education tool: the format scales across audiences and topics while preserving the essential hands-on, guided-practice quality that makes it work.
The infrastructure I built around workshops reflects how seriously I took them as a repeatable practice, and it connects to my broader approach to everything. I wrote in 2018 about building machine-readable, YAML-driven workshops with embedded links to service-provider features — treating my workshop content the way I treat everything, as structured, maintainable, reusable artifacts rather than one-off slide decks. This let me link directly to API service provider features within my workshops and storytelling, keeping the content current and connected to the real tools. The investment in workshop infrastructure was the same instinct that drives my whole practice: build the content as durable, structured, reusable artifacts so the work compounds rather than evaporating after each session. By 2025 I was curating the broader landscape of API trainings to help people learn, recognizing that the workshop and training ecosystem had matured into a real resource. The through-line is that workshops are where API evangelism becomes API education — where the awareness that evangelism generates gets converted into actual capability through hands-on, guided practice. The talk inspires; the blog post informs; but the workshop is where people actually learn to do the thing. That hands-on transformation, from knowing-about to being-able-to, is the unique and lasting value of the workshop, and it’s why I’ve always considered running them some of the most genuinely useful work I do.
References
- My API Building Blocks Workshop With Intel At The Gartner AADI Conference
- Workshops In Addition To Hackathons For Your API
- Keeping The API Conversation Moving Forward At The Gluecon APIStrat Unworkshops
- My API 101 Workshop At APIStrat In Chicago Next Week
- Developing Internal API Curriculum And Workshops For Your Organization
- API Evangelist And Streamdata.io API Lifecycle Workshops
- I Participated In An API Workshop With The European Commission Last Week
- All Of The Discussions From The BYU API University Workshop In Utah
- The API Trainings To Help You Learn More About APIs
