Trump Rolling to Make APIs Great Again

TLDR; I’m tired of the election, and I made a fun prank calling app with the latest Stoplight product — Scenarios. Rick Roll your friends with trumprolled.com, and bring some cheer to this decidedly uncheerful election.

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Politics. Clinton. Trump. Obama. Walls. Pu**y (API Corner is actually in the corner of a locker room.). Tax Returns. Open Borders.

These words mean something to everyone. They change people, and as November 8th creeps closer and closer, the power of these words get stronger and stronger.

This election cycle is a brand new monster. I haven’t talked to my Mom in a month. I miss her. I want to tell her I love her, but if I do all she says is ‘Thanks Obama’. I couldn’t handle the pain anymore, and the confusion (Why is she thanking Obama? Is he my dad? If he is, ‘Thanks Dad’!), so I blocked my mom. It hurts, but on November 9th, I am looking forward to calling my mom, telling her I missed her, and most importantly that I will always love her.

Sorry, I got side tracked. Back to the point. At Stoplight, when we walk into the office we leave those words at the door. Why? HR, obviously, and we are mad because there are 3 words (or letters) missing: Application Protocol Interface (or API). We love APIs, and we want to make them great again! They are everywhere, everyone uses them, and yet they remain shrouded in a cloak of technical mystery. By now, you have probably googled API, and still don’t know exactly what they are. If you can’t talk to your Mom, and want to, do what I do. Ask her about her stance on APIs.

For a little bit, it feels good to have my Mom back. Explaining to her that when she is reading her Facebook News Feed that APIs are making that happen, and that she has been consuming APIs for years feels nice at first. But quickly I realize that is some kind of messed up.

APIs are the one thing that the digital world seems to understand universally. For something that is used everywhere (thermostats, rockets, cars, and now self tying shoes), it is baffling how few people know about them.. They control all aspects of our lives. When Instagram stops working, Facebook is flooded with posts shouting about the world ending. And Holy shit, if Facebook and Instagram were to both go down, the world might actually end.

And that is the problem, and why the lack of conversation around APIs is a serious issue. APIs aren’t a technical issue, they are a people issue. A couple weeks ago when Reddit, Twitter, and PayPal all went down, and when Yahoo got hacked years ago, the story should have been around APIs. Because if Yahoo cared more about their customers and APIs, then maybe they would still be Yahoo, and maybe they wouldn’t be fighting over 1 billion dollars.

By now you should understand why my Mom’s lack of understanding around APIs is so painfully frustrating. The issues around APIs affect all of us, because APIs are heavily intertwined in our lives. Facebook going down, losing a billion dollars, losing your company, and so many more real issues that I don’t have time to even talk about are in dire need of attention.

No matter how hard we tried to avoid speaking about the election in the office, we couldn’t anymore. So I made something to cheer us up, and to start a conversation around APIs.

Enter Trump Rolled, powered by our newest product — Stoplight Scenarios! Trump Rolled was never meant to be a real thing, but before we could release the Scenarios beta, we needed to make sure what we built worked. And as I have stated before testing sucks, so I tried to make it fun by prank calling my friends.

Turned out that I had too much fun, and I was able to forget about the election for a little bit. So, I made it into a thing, and I truly hope that it starts a conversation and keep it going. As we go down this road, we will learn about how Trump Rolled was made without writing any code, how Twilio’s and SendGrid’s API were used to make it happen, and we will learn about what/why Scenarios.

In the meantime, roll on and tell us about how you develop, design, test and document your APIs by sending us a message on Twitter with #MakeAPIsGreatAgain. If Stoplight Scenarios sound interesting, please register for the beta here.

I love you America, and thank you for reading.

PS — I want to give a shout out to SendGrid, Twilio, Kin Lane, Programmable Web, AWS and The New Stack. Keep fighting the good fight, and thank you.