Last September I had the pleasure of speaking at API Specs 2022; the title of my talk was “Specs are important, trust is mandatory.” The idea was that good specifications are always incomplete, and that real communication between teams rests on a foundation of trust. I turned to the FDA nutrition labels as an example of a proto-API, and how they rest on a foundation of trust that the public has in the FDA as an institution.

Trust is something I spend a lot of time thinking about as a software architect, because it’s so vital to my job. It’s one thing to demonstrate that software works, whether through specs, tests, dashboards, and other tools. It’s another thing entirely to build trust in the community of people who work with that software: the producers, stakeholders, and users. When the real world changes, as it inevitably does, how do we know the software will respond in kind? With trust.

You can find my talk on YouTube - I hope you like it!