Data contracts at the cross-section of best practices

I see data contracts as being at the cross-section of best practices.

In particular, they take the best practices from APIs, Data Governance, and Platform Engineering.

From APIs, we take the idea of interfaces.

From Data Governance, we encourage the more effective use of data through collaboration, while reducing risk.

From Platform Engineering, we provision a contract-based data platform that makes it easy to create, manage, and consume data.

With data contracts we are taking the best practices from other domains and applying those that make the most sense to data.

This actually works both ways.

The above diagram is from a slide I shared in my talk yesterday at apidays London, and at lunch I enjoyed being part of a passionate discussion on API governance, what it means, how mature it is (or is not), and so on.

My suggestion to those there was to learn from data governance, which has been around for decades already and, while not perfect, has many lessons that are just as applicable to APIs as they are to data.

In some ways data is catching up with other areas of software development, and in other ways we are the leaders.

So, my advice this Friday is to speak more with people in adjacent fields. Not only do we have a lot to learn - we also have a lot to give.