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If you are active in the Apigee community, it’s very likely that you have seen replies by Apigee Solution Architect Dino Chiesa (@dchiesa1). This is your chance to learn more about how he got started at Apigee/Google, what excites him about APIs, his Apigee tips, and more.
How did you get started working at Apigee/Google and what is your current role?
I loved APIs, oh gosh, since I can't remember when! The idea of making everything invocable, allowing every system to be programmable, made so much sense to me. And so when I heard from an old colleague and friend of mine about Apigee, it sounded like a perfect match. I was looking for a role in a smaller organization, working with people I liked, where I could help people solve problems, using a tech stack I really believed in. That friend encouraged me to inquire about working at Apigee, and the team gave me a chance, for which I am so grateful.
Formally, my current role is Customer Engineer; that means I'm responsible for helping customers understand how to use Apigee and related technologies to solve their business problems. But the part I really love about my gig is that I get to do so much more. I work with the engineering team on new features or enhancements and the odd bugfix; I collaborate with the documentation team on changes and expansions; I work with the product team on all sorts of things; and I get to do demonstrations, videos, screencasts, talks at conferences. It's very engaging, and this broader perspective keeps me motivated and interested.
How did you get started working in IT?
I blame my mother! Fate blessed me with a wise mom, and fortunate circumstances. When I was still in grade school, she recognized that computers would be a big part of the future, and she encouraged me to learn. Our family had enough money to buy a computer, and it became clear quickly that I had "the knack". Kind of a standard "how you got started" story I guess.
The more interesting question might be, why am I still in IT? As I got older, I learned that I could use the computer and that knack to solve problems for people, and the pay rate for doing that was much higher than the pay rate for cleaning tables in a restaurant! Effectively, I've been working in IT since I was a teenager.
And in so many different places; over the years, I've gotten to work with teams at banks, manufacturers, agriculture, telecommunications, government, entertainment companies... All sorts of different organizations, and all over the world, really.
It's been so fun. So rewarding. I've been fortunate to find work that I enjoy doing, and that I am pretty good at. Those things, plus the chance to help people, is what keeps me energized and engaged.
What excites you most about APIs and the future of Apigee?
When I started with Apigee, the metaphor of the API as a way to expose every system was well accepted, but not well established, if you know what I mean. People understood the idea, but didn't have the practical experience doing it. So in the early days, the technical customer-facing people did a bunch of educating, and as part of that, Apigee as a team built a great body of tooling, expertise, and content that companies used to launch themselves into the digital world. I'm proud of the work we did during those days, lowering the obstacles to adoption of APIs, with good governance and management.
We are well beyond that now; we don't have to educate people on the definition of REST. The term "API" appears in mainstream business press. Even people out of IT have a good basic understanding.
And because APIs have gone mainstream, the opportunities for Apigee are so exciting now. There's so much we can do in product and tool offerings. I can't make any statements about future product direction, but I can describe some cool things we're thinking about.
Three areas.
First, what I'll call "API lifecycle". Over the years, Apigee invested in building out a superb API runtime. AND, there are still huge opportunities for assisting organizations on lifecycle issues, like:
- Building specifications. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to author new APIs easily from re-usable piece-parts? Or starting from a template or "theme"? Wouldn't it be marvelous to be able to collaboratively define new APIs?
- Curation. If everything is programmable, there will be LOTS of APIs. Being able to organize them at enterprise scale is essential. That means tagging, curation, analyzing, versioning, collating usage data, even through retirement. Many companies are building D-I-Y solutions to this today, and there are opportunities for improvement.
- Discovery. Imagine you're a CTO at an information driven company. Every new hire on the development team, or every person charged with building a new experience or enhancing an existing system, wants to be able to find existing APIs that will help them succeed. How do they do it?
- And there's lots more here.
The second big opportunity: expanding beyond REST. Now, APIs come in many styles: Async APIs, GraphQL, gRPC, and more. All of them can benefit from the capabilities of API Management. For example, Authorization, rate limiting, and routing in the gateway layer; Publishing those APIs to a developer portal to ease consumption; Getting common analytics and monitoring all of those APIs. We can bring the power of Apigee to all these new styles.
The third big area I'm excited about is the intersection of AI and APIs. There are some obvious opportunities: for example applying AI to detect anomalies in API traffic - like a spike in latency, or a surge in errors - and then suggest mitigations. If we do it right, we can apply AI to lots of different problems. For example, analyzing APIs for similarity to enable reduction in complexity. Or using AI to configure different routing, to improve response time. What about using AI to help author APIs?
What motivates you to be such a passionate contributor to this Community?
I love helping people, and I think technology is fun. Detail delights me. The way the auth tag of an encrypted JWT glints in the early morning sunlight instills joy in my eye. When I can share what I know with someone and lighten their load or help them make progress, I feel fulfilled. And doing it digitally, leaving the archive behind for some future reader to find and benefit from, makes it even more worthwhile.
What do you enjoy about interacting with customers in this format?
It's so honest and engaging. True, I've got "the knack", but I'm no robot. Like many of us, I suffered from the loss of basic human interaction when we all retreated to our home offices to work. But despite that loss, the community model brings a special appeal, an opportunity for dialogue in a constrained form. I like the challenge. But I also like the purity of the exchange.
Some questions are well formed and clear. Easy questions get a pointer to a search result. I spend a bit more time building answers to more elaborate questions, anticipating a future reader or two who may confront a similar puzzle. Sometimes the question is more vague and open ended. And in those cases, just helping to define the real question, What are we solving for? , is a charming and magical journey. Sometimes the question is so abrupt; those cases may be a sign that the person is overwhelmed or frustrated, and that is an opportunity for me to look at what might be causing the frustration. Can we fix it? That honest feedback is invaluable. Sometimes it's hard to get that kind of honest feedback in person, or in a face-to-face conversation. Interacting with people this way provides a unique opportunity IMO.
Do you have any tips to share for using Apigee that users may not be aware of?
Yes! One big tip: to take advantage of the available tools and resources! There are lots of open source tools that can help you on your way. Apigeelint analyzes your API proxies for good coding practices; apigeetool can deploy proxies; there's "another Apigee client" that you can use as a CLI; there are 30 or more open source Java callouts for Apigee; there's a terraform provider for Apigee; there's a "devrel" repository that has lots of good examples for proxies and other things. So many things to take advantage of. I'm not sure, but I believe that many Apigee users are not aware of the wide variety of tools and resources that are available to help.
Anything else you would like to share with the Google Cloud or Apigee community?
Yes: stay tuned for more good stuff in the Google Cloud community. We have a ton of new energy we're dedicating to this. We'll be rolling out new ways of connecting, new support for you, and more participation in the community by subject-matter experts. We're glad you're along for the ride, and we think you'll be pleased to see the progress.
Thanks, Dino, for taking the time to answer our questions.
What do you enjoy most about APIs and Apigee? Share your comments below ⬇️.
- And don’t forget to say “Hi” to Dino. 🙂