1175. In this bonus segment, which originally aired last October for Grammarpaloozians, we look at how AI is disrupting the freelance writing industry with author Suzanne Bowness. She shares her strategy for experimenting with different AI tools and the importance of being "conversant" in them for clients. We also look at the challenge of losing clients to AI but gaining new ones who were dissatisfied with the machine-generated text.

Find Suzanne on her website, Codeword Communications.

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It's 2 AM, and your cellphone begins to vibrate off the nightstand. It's your CEO. Picking up, while still in a daze, they frantically speak the words, "The business is down! We need your help." It's not a database issue, or a DNS issue; it's much worse: it's an identity issue. Every microservice that depends on token validation is failing. Your API gateway can't verify JWTs. Your users can't log in. Your partners can't access your APIs. It's everything.

What a moment to learn that identity was never "just a feature," it was infrastructure all along.

Too many engineering organizations still treat authentication and authorization as a checkbox item — something you bolt on during a sprint or two, drag the issue into the "completed" column, and then forget about it. But identity touches every service, every API boundary, every user interaction, and every compliance audit. When it breaks, nothing works. When it's fragile, everything is fragile. The teams that internalize the practice of treating identity with the same rigor they give to databases, networking, and observability ship faster and recover from incidents more quickly. By prioritising identity as core infrastructure, teams spend far less time firefighting security issues and more time building.

This post makes the case for treating identity as first-class infrastructure, explores what that means in practice, and connects it to the broader industry shift toward Zero Trust architecture.

Many engineers I’ve worked with over the years see OpenAPI and AsyncAPI as a configuration for whatever tooling outcome they desire. I see OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, and JSON Schema that defines them as a common language that leads to common understanding. Before all the technology bullshit, I am a storyteller. The words matter the most to me, right after the people, and before all of the technology. OpenAPI and AsyncAPI represented a common way for us to communicate and move in the right direction.

I’ve personally invested a lot into Swagger and OpenAPI, as well as AsyncAPI and JSON Schema. I’ve spend my own time and money, but I’ve also spent other people’s money on these specs. I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the services and tooling that have baked these specifications into their solutions, which their customers then can speak as part of their regular operations. All of this time and money, services and tooling, all accumulates over the years getting folks on the same page, speaking the same way about how we integrate.

Trust me, I know all of OpenAPI and AsyncAPI limitations. I am painfully aware of the complexity and baggage of JSON Schema. They all have a lot of flaws, like the people who are putting these specifications to work consciously and unconsciously. When it comes to telling stories and reaching my audience, I am rarely looking for perfect, precision, and things always being right. I am looking to reach the masses. I am looking to influence the widest possible market when it comes to the impact APIs are having when my audience is running their business.

Some of the people I’ve interviewed lately, people like Anil Dash, Fran Mendez, and Tony Tam understand the amount of investment that has gone into each of the specs, but also making the ecosystem aware of each specification and how it is applied across services and tooling. People who lead API operations across large enterprises know how hard it is to get people on the same page, speaking the same language, and heading in the right direction. This is why these specifications matter, and being able to change behavior will always take time.