That may sound odd coming from a product manager, being surprised by how people use our products, but the openness of our APIs allows for solutions even our own engineers never imagined. I’ve spent much of my career thinking about API design. It’s hard. Open API design can't be an afterthought. Many products claim to offer open APIs, but slapping one on after the fact doesn’t work. We’ve even seen the Army fund a product, then contract a second company just to add an API. That approach always fails. Open APIs must be built in from day one. Yet it’s hard to mesure API success until someone actually tries to use it, then you find out if it’s useful or useless.

Over my 20+ years at MAK, we often faced a different challenge. Our main customers were system integrators building platforms. For them, the API was everything. They had to modify and tailor the product to fulfill contracts. We didn’t profit from custom labor: the open API was essential to our business. For years, we prioritized openness, sometimes at the expense of focusing on out-of-the-box usability. But it let integrators meet their needs independently, and it built tools that could be flexed to meet any need in a truly multidomain environment.

The MAK focus has evolved over the past dozen years. Today, we prioritize both powerful APIs and out-of-the-box usability. Major programs now use MAK ONE right off the shelf, while still benefiting from our open APIs. What’s more, many of these capabilities are now accessible to people who aren’t expert programmers, thanks to LUA scripting, GUI configuration, and editable text files. That openness was fundamental to the design from day one, and it continues to pay off. 

Now I can attend a conference filled with soldiers, marines, airmen, and government scientists and watch them build platforms and solutions, without any help from MAK, and sometimes doing things we never imagined. It makes for a truly inspiring week. I really love my job. The jet lag gets hard sometimes, but seeing the outcome of 30+ years of API design at MAK really feels great.

Thank you ST Engineering Antycip team for being an amazing partner and thank you to the MAK ONE customers who continue to impress me every day!

PS... I'm giving a webinar on Tuesday, September 16 that's all about the upcoming release of MAK ONE 2025. I hope you'll join me for a walk through of all that's coming in this release - bring questions! You can register for either of our 10:30AM or 9:00PM EDT sessions—whichever suits your schedule best! And if you can't make it, we'll send you a recording after the webinar.