P@ Log

Paul Buchheit posted an excellent piece today, Communicating with code, which touches many of my favorite topics: the importance of APIs for innovation, prototypes, iteration. He reasserts an idea that I’ve heard initially from Bill Joy at JavaOne 2003, that innovation happens elsewhere.

Public APIs enable everyone to experiment with new ideas and create new ways of using your product. This is incredibly powerful because no matter how brilliant you and your coworkers are, there are always going to be smarter people outside of your company.

In that same spirit, yesterday my colleague Ben Lisbakken released the Ajax API Playground. This should make it much easier for anyone to get started with Google Ajax APIs, and since it is open source, I hope it will be used by many other companies and projects.