API Evangelist Conversations

Mapping the technical details of API operations to the human conversation.

API Evangelist Conversations is a technology podcast hosted by Kin Lane, with 37 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Kin Lane hosts API Evangelist Conversations, a technology show with 37 episodes published.

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  API Evangelist Conversations

  API Evangelist Conversation with Jens Neuse on GraphQL Federation, Deterministic Joins, and Why MCP Has Very Little To Do With Agents Calling APIs

  Sep 3, 202656 min

  Jens Neuse is the co-founder and CEO of WunderGraph, the company behind Cosmo — the open-source GraphQL federation stack running inside enterprises like Mercedes, Rivian and eBay. This conversation went two ways. Jens walked me through what GraphQL federation actually buys an organization, and it is not what the versus debates say it is: fragments that let a UI evolve without leaving dead fields behind in a REST API forever, and entities that let separate teams agree on a key so their data can be joined deterministically rather than hopefully. Then he made the sharpest claim I have had on the show — that once you go past about five MCP tool calls you are gluing them together with inference, and inference is slow, expensive and unpredictable, so the architecture is simply wrong. Models are good at writing code; let them write a program and run it. We also talked about who owns the megaphone in every technology wave, why he does not care whether GraphQL beats REST as long as everyone agrees on a standard, and how it is more than a little strange that we invented Web MCP while the user agent has been sitting in the HTTP header the entire time.

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  API Evangelist Conversations

  API Evangelist Conversation with Lukasz Gornicki on What the Linux Foundation Actually Gave AsyncAPI, Why a Sponsor Walked Away Because of It, and Open Source Europe as a Home for a Specification

  Sep 1, 202637 min

  Lukasz Gornicki spent years as executive director of AsyncAPI, which means he has already run the experiment everyone else is still theorizing about — what a foundation actually does for a specification once the announcement is over. He is now part-time, and hoping to go full-time, at Open Source Europe, a Belgian association built as a European alternative to the US-based Open Source Collective. I brought him the question I have been carrying since I forked Spectral: where should a rule-set specification live. What I got back was not a recommendation, it was a set of distinctions. The Linux Foundation gave AsyncAPI intellectual property and trademark protection and very little else — protection that turns out to mean a free letter from a lawyer, after which you need a litigation budget you do not have. It funds no engineering work, which is why Open Source Collective had to exist alongside it. And one sponsor declined to renew specifically because AsyncAPI was part of the Linux Foundation. Lukasz walks the other options too — why Apache is the only foundation that will actually enforce a governance model on you, and the price it charges in your project's name; why Eclipse left the US for Canada; and what Open Source Europe can and cannot do today. Underneath all of it is the question he says has to come first, and that nobody in this conversation has answered yet: ask the people who would fund this what they actually care about, because open governance needs no foundation at all. Correction, added after recording: in this conversation I say the German government reached out and that Germany is committed. That overstates it — Germany has made no commitment. The Netherlands is the only government with a published, documented dependency on this format, in the developer.overheid.nl post of 31 July 2026. Conversations with Italy are ongoing and nothing is committed there either.

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  API Evangelist Conversations

  API Evangelist Conversation with Danny Preussler on Reopening the SoundCloud API, the Agent That Scraped Its Way to a Token, and Writing Documentation for Machines

  Aug 27, 202628 min

  Danny Preussler is an engineer on the API team at SoundCloud in Berlin, and he came up entirely on the client side — BlackBerry apps, then Android, then eBay, Groupon, and Viacom before landing at SoundCloud seven years ago. This is a conversation about one of the great API origin stories and one of the great API closures. SoundCloud shipped a public API in 2008, one year after the company started, and literally built its own product on the same API everyone else could use — the Android lead got hired because he wrote a better SoundCloud app on the public API than SoundCloud had. Then the major label content arrived, the scrapers and downloaders arrived, a hundred thousand new apps registered in 2016 alone, and in 2017 the program closed for what was supposed to be a temporary pause. Danny walks through the soft reopening of the last two years, the Tyk gateway that made it possible to reopen at all, and the moment that changed everything: they handed an agent the task of creating a SoundCloud app, it could not find a token, so it scraped the website for one and quietly rewired itself from the public API to the internal API. We also get into why deprecated endpoints started spiking after five years of silence, why their ticket volume went up because of a stale doc page, and where Danny lands on MCP when he turns the questions back on me.

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  API Evangelist Conversations

  API Evangelist Conversation with Emma Kriskinans on Marketing from Inside VS Code, Building a Trust Hierarchy for Your Sources, and Filling In the Middle Ground on AI

  Aug 25, 202643 min

  Emma Kriskinans is VP Global Marketing at Tyk, and since March she has done the bulk of her working day inside Claude Code and VS Code — not because anyone asked her to, but because she wanted to learn it at the harder level. This one is a two-way comparison of notes on using AI for go-to-market, between a marketing leader running a team inside a company with a brand to protect and a one-man band who answers to nobody. Emma walks through why she chose the IDE over the browser, using the UK driving test as the analogy — learn on a manual and you can drive an automatic, but not the other way around — the folder structure she keeps for Tyk work, advisory work, and personal work, and the trust hierarchy document that tells the model which sources to weight and when to come back and tell her it does not have one. We get into what she deliberately does not use it for, because she considers herself a writer and the generated prose lands in the uncanny valley, and into the etiquette forming around AI disclosure, the shaming that runs in both directions, and why neither of us thinks the dividing up of people is an accident. It ends somewhere neither of us planned, on novels, on the backstory you write and never publish, and on whether the humanities graduate's moment has finally arrived.

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  API Evangelist Conversations

  API Evangelist Conversation with Sebastian Loch on Verified Nutrition Data, Building Image Recognition on Top of LLMs, and a 100x Influx of Vibe-Coding Developers

  Aug 18, 202637 min

  Sebastian Loch runs business development at fatsecret, where he has spent thirteen years building out the largest verified nutrition database in the world — country by country, across sixty-two markets and twenty-six languages. This is a check-in on a conversation we started back in 2024, when he was genuinely worried that the AI rush would strip-mine the proprietary data they had spent twenty years verifying. Three years on, the answer is more interesting than either the doom or the hype: the moat held, and it held because of scale, global reach, and two decades of investment in the API. Sebastian walks through how the arrival of LLMs made ten years of their own computer-vision work obsolete overnight and simultaneously handed them the image recognition engine their developers had been asking for since 2016, why they will use AI to improve every process around the data but never to generate the nutrition data itself, and how vibe coding has driven a hundred- fold increase in daily developer signups at a bootstrapped, profitable, never-funded company. We also go two ways: Sebastian turns the questions back on me about API sprawl, AI slop on the API side, and whether any of it can be rated and ranked.

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