In my lifetime, there have been lots of “you’ll always remember where you were” moments. The Challenger disaster and September 11, 2001, are the first two that always come to mind for me. But I think this will be the first time that the thing I will remember most is that I mostly stayed at home.
It has been a challenging year for everybody as I can tell from the many, many Zoom/Teams/WebEx sessions with clients, team members, and partners – whether it is the loss of family and friends, of which there has been so much, or the challenge of illness, something I gained some personal experience of back in April. And we’ve done most of it through the medium of our computers and the tools we have used to keep working.
Like no other year, we have been reliant on APIs and how well they work, and I can say with a degree of certainty that, for the most part, our industry and the technology we rely on has stepped up to meet the challenge.
There have been some glitches and missteps along the way. Slack, perhaps least surprisingly, had a dip in performance around March 2020 when everybody moved their way of working and hit them hard – but they held up and have recovered completely, regularly topping our charts in API.expert, which we launched in Jan 2020 and will be launching a premium version of in 2021.
APIs and our increasing reliance on them as the way to do work, the way to do finance, the way to do government services are here to stay and the quality of them and the impact they have on your operations and users have never, ever been more important.
So, let’s raise a glass of whatever you prefer or a mug of something comforting and toast in the new year – and close the door firmly on the year that none of us will ever forget and look forward to something brighter, and for the API sector, exciting to come.
As for us, we have managed to come through the year in better shape than we entered. Lots of new clients in the finance sector. We’ve helped define some new standards in different sectors for how to measure quality. We gained a patent for our CASC scoring system. We launched a whole new look and feel for the product and built on our partnership with Postman. We didn’t achieve everything we set out to but given the challenges, we shall not complain.
Happy New Year everybody! And let’s make it a great one!
David
