Nafitko Capabilities

What happens when the gateway patterns we built for REST don't fit the AI agent world? Christian Posta, CTO at Solo.io, joins me to talk about why MCP and agent-to-agent communication demanded a completely new proxy architecture, how identity and authorization get complicated when non-deterministic agents start calling the shots, and the security risks lurking in runtime MCP server changes. Plus, we dig into Solo.io's open source strategy with Agent Gateway and what enterprises actually need to get MCP into production.

What happens after you build something that changes an industry? Fran Méndez created AsyncAPI—a specification now valued at $34 million—but he doesn't have $34 million. In this raw conversation, Fran opens up about walking away from the project he built over 10 years, the brutal economics of open source, and why he's now building Commune, a social network for newsletters. We talk about burnout, the "warehouse" of tech capitalism that slowly suffocates you, and why email might be one of the last spaces where people still have real control. If you've ever poured yourself into something bigger than you, felt the weight of expectations, or wondered what comes after you stop being "the guy" for something—this episode of the Naftiko Capabilities podcast is for you.

In this episode of the Naftiko Capabilities podcast, we sit down with Anil Dash—blogger, creator, and former founder of Glitch—to explore the fascinating origin story and enduring relevance of Markdown. Dash offers a firsthand account of how John Gruber's simple plain-text formatting tool emerged from the early blogging era on Movable Type, was beta-tested by the late Aaron Schwartz, and eventually spread through GitHub and Stack Overflow to become what Dash calls "the control plane for AI." The conversation surfaces unexpected wisdom: Markdown's lack of rigid standardization, once a source of frustration for technically-minded developers, may actually be the secret to its success—keeping it accessible, hackable, and resistant to enterprise capture. Dash reflects on how the push for formal specs and big-company validation often makes tools harder to implement and easier to co-opt, while the messy, human-scale origins of standards like Markdown and early RSS allowed them to thrive organically. It's a thoughtful meditation on what really matters when building technology that lasts: not impressive credentials or enterprise adoption, but real people making real things.

Drowning in distributed system chaos? You're not alone. In this episode, we sit down with David Boyne, creator of Event Catalog, to explore how organizations can bring order to the madness of modern architectures. David shares how his open-source tool evolved from a simple event documentation project into a powerful way to map domains, visualize boundaries, and make sense of the services, schemas, and signals flowing through the enterprise. We dig into the synergy between event-driven architecture and domain-driven design, why business context matters as much as technical specs, and how documenting your architecture today could become the foundation for AI and agent-driven automation tomorrow. Whether you're a developer buried in undocumented microservices or a product owner trying to understand what you actually have, this conversation offers a fresh perspective on turning architectural chaos into clarity. Check out Event Catalog at eventcatalog.dev and tune in now.

This episode of Naftiko Capabilities is focused on exploring some of the more advanced, but also foundational aspects of using JSON Schema and OpenAPI with David Biesack, Chief API Officer at Apiture/CSI. David shares their approach to using JSON Schema, along with the OpenAPI specification to get their hands around API and schema complexity, and bundling the schema and APIs needed for specific business context, then generating the documentation and code they need to power the business application and integrations they need. David shares their approach to using YAML and JSON, the bundling and unbundling of schema using references, as well as how the extend and ensure schema are discoverable. Demonstrating a sort of mastery with JSON Schema and OpenAPI that works for delivering APIs, SDKs, MCP, A2A, and all the other acronyms you need to power our business.

This episode of Naftiko Capabilities explores hypermedia through a business-outcomes lens, grounding long-standing API and integration concepts in the realities of today’s AI-driven moment. We bring together conversations with Mike Amundsen and Kevin Swiber to unpack hypermedia not as an abstract theory, but as the practical art of making meaningful, late-bound connections between systems using rich metadata, shared semantics, and clear affordances for action. Ultimately, the episode connects hypermedia’s roots in REST and HTML to modern AI workflows, arguing that well-modeled resources, behaviors, and transitions remain essential capabilities for building systems that humans and machines can both understand and use effectively.

This is the Naftiko Capabilities podcast for January 13th, 2026, where we share excerpts from our conversations with Sam Newman and Simon Wardley on artificial intelligence's impact on the enterprise. Sam's conversation dovetails with last week's episode about microservices, while Simon helps us break down the relationship between the business of AI and the business of cloud computing. Both conversations demonstrate that much of what we're encountering isn't new—we're simply experiencing old playbooks getting refreshed through large language models and generative AI hype.

Microservices continues to be one of the top signals we see when profiling and talking to enterprise organizations about APIs and integration. To better understand the current landscape, we checked in with two microservices experts, Mike Amundsen and Sam Newman, to explore the state of microservices in an age of AI integration. We asked both Mike and Sam about the state of microservices, then went deeper with Sam to explore the business capabilities side—examining how organizational structure, people, and the overall enterprise journey influence microservices adoption and whether teams succeed with their microservices investments.

This is the Naftiko Capabilities podcast for January 6th, 2026, where we sit down with Mike Amundsen and Christian Posta to ask, "What is a Capability?" Mike brings a rich understanding of the web, hypermedia, and semantics, while Christian dives into the technical details from the artificial intelligence perspective, MCP, and the gateway view of capabilities. This discussion is helping inform what we are building at Naftiko when it comes to capability-centered integrations and automation, kicking off a new podcast series focused on aligning engineering and business with capabilities thinking that helps us all get down to business when it comes to enterprise integrations.