API Evangelist Conversation with Raymond Camden, Developer Advocate at Adobe

I am Raymond Camden. Welcome Ray.

I am a senior developer evangelist for Adobe.

Too many different things. So my main like nine to five, uh, I was hired by the Acrobat services team, uh, which is a group of APIs related to document management. And I like to be honest when I talk about it and say, it’s not. It’s not cool, it’s not awesome, but it’s super practical. It’s all kind of stuff like, you know, we’re getting millions of documents and word, et cetera, and we want to, uh, consolidate on PDF. So we allow you to go from office to PDF at scale. Um, Again, not, not fun, but like super practical. Um, you need to do, you have millions of documents and you want to offer samples online because you sell eBooks. Uh, we can do things like splitting PDFs. So you can shove out like the first 10 pages, whatever. Uh, everything that you could do in Acrobat, the kind of slice and dice PDFs and stuff we have APIs for. Um, and very easy to use, uh, very simple. Very practical. Uh, there are some kind of cool ones where you could do things like use word as a kind of a template language and create dynamic PDFs and stuff like that. Uh, but. That’s like my, my, my main thing, the main area where I work as an evangelist. I also am involved with our Firefly APIs as well. Um, these are the more fun ones to be honest, where, uh, you can do a lot of things with images. So, you know, from basic text to image, uh, to doing things at scale such that. I need to create banner ads and advertising in multiple formats, multiple languages, uh, with multiple different styles, uh, our Firefly or Photoshop they allow you to automate a lot of that, which, which I think is really, really neat. And one of the more practical uses, uh, for Gen AI, thirdly, my kind of third area, uh, API wise, anyway, uh, I’ve been doing a lot of Gen AI, uh, Uh, research on the Gemini platform from Google. Um, mainly because they were free. Like, honestly, like that’s the only reason, uh, I know chat GPT, like they, they’re number one, but you have to pay 20 bucks, which. Is I spend more on that on beer. Uh, but I didn’t want to buy it. Like I just, I didn’t, I didn’t want to spend money to honestly like evangelize their product for them. And when Google announced their APIs and I could play with it for free, like that was it, I just went crazy into there. Um, I’ll call out Cloudflare, Cloudflare also has a good free tier for AI stuff as well.

uh, they have integrations with a couple of different models. So, uh, I last looked at it a year ago. I didn’t realize it was that long. Um, they’re serverless, they’re, they’re, they’re serverless product, just workers. Is great in general, again, like a stupid free tier. Um, and they added native support to do AI stuff. And again, like a year ago, I did a quick test, sent a prompt, got a response. It just plain worked. Um, and again, very, very generous free tier, uh, over there.

Um, it’s funny. Like when I first started, for some reason, I really wanted to be practical, which if you’ve been following me for a while, that’s not at all. Um, if I find some new API, I will build something impractical with it. I’ll have fun, but I kind of figure. I blog about it. I show you how easy to use. My use case is stupid, but hopefully you dear reader can have a practical, uh, use case based on what I showed you. Uh, and when I was playing with Gen AI, this is back early. A lot of the examples were frivolous. It was, you know, chatting and people would share fun examples. I would as well. And along with a not wanting to pay money for it be, I was, I felt like I should do something practical with it. Um, so. My initial experiments were just kind of like, kind of very basic. Here’s some data, give me something back. Um, and then of course I went silly with it, but I. Started with basic prompts and just gradually learned a bit more. Um, especially like I got into it with Gemini right when their API came out. So as they added more stuff to it, I use that as an excuse to learn. So multimodal stuff, for example, uh, when they added APIs for that, that’s when I learned multimodal calls and gen AI.

Uh, so I think there’s a couple answers to that. Uh, so Gemini has a great UI. They have an AI studio. Um, and I do a lot of prototyping there, but it’s mostly a sanity check. Like I want to try this particular prompt. Um, So without writing code, even though it may be 5, 10 minutes, you know, real short, I’ll go to AI studio. I’ll do the prompt, you know, kind of hard coded, um, static example. And if I see, okay, I’m getting some logical out of this. This may work. Then I look at, um, writing code. Uh, one thing you find out with gen AI pretty quickly that the code is not hard at all. Um, it’s, it’s trivial. Like I remember that my first call to Gemini within like 30 minutes of looking at the doc and the code, less than that, I had it working. I could pass a prompt and get something back. That’s when you learn that the prompt is incredibly important. The code is like just stupid. Post type calls. Um, it’s a lot. I’m showing my age here. Uh, I started in, uh, back in dev with, with cold fusion. And one of the things that cold fusion did was make it really easy to talk to a database. And it did like, it was, you know, once you set it up, you could. Write SQL in your code and get stuff back. It was really, really simple. Then you learn writing good SQL, writing performance SQL, having your database set up. That was a like years and years of stuff that you had to learn. So gen AI, the code part for the most part has been next to nothing. Thinking about how to craft that has been a lot more work. And that’s, I think kind of unique in the API space because typically you don’t Think that much about arguments. Like if I’m doing imagery sizing, like, okay, I care about the size. Uh, but for Gen AI, you’ve spent way more time thinking about your prompt and thinking about the system instructions and all that I find it to be way, way more important than kind of what I’m used to typically when working with APIs.

Yeah, so Jim and I has done some good work in that respects in terms of, uh, being able to spend, uh, send JSON schema. Uh, so you can get kind of very precise, like, like one of the first things I found out. Gen AI is, I would just give you a blob of text back and it was cool text. But if you wanted like particular aspects of that, if you wanted to treat it like data and not just like human speaking, initially it was really hard to do that, like you could ask for JSON and sometimes it would just do random stuff, uh, with, with the Gemini, uh, being able to do JSON schema, you could say, I want an array of objects that has this key and this key, and you fill it in exactly like that. Uh, the blog posts I did two hours ago. Um, shows an example of that where in the first iteration, I was asking for insights and I got a great paragraph, a text back perfect. But then I wanted each insight by itself and I use a JSON schema to say you will give me an array of strings. And that gave me exactly that. The next iteration was, I want an array of insights, but for each insight, I want you to tell me if it’s positive, negative, or neutral. And again, using JSON Schema, I was able to define, like, these are the exact strings that you will use when you return data. So that, that’s been great, uh, for me for those type of demos.

It changes every day, pretty much. Uh, you know, so part of the evangelist role is working with engineering, providing feedback, um, giving advice about how we should release stuff. And I do that for the Acrobat folks. I do that, uh, kind of unofficially. On the Firefly side as well. Um, and the Gen AI stuff is just general research. It’s obviously. Becoming very, very important. So, um, it’s, I, I kind of hit separate things each week in terms of what I’m researching. So the blog post from like two hours ago, uh, was an example of that, where it was just, uh, I had a web app for a stream. I did. This showing JavaScript charting and I’d build some sample, um, some sample sales data for the chart. And I saw a great blog post, uh, by, and give me a second. I want to make sure I say her name correctly. Uh, by Elizabeth, Elizabeth Siegel, uh, where she actually used cloud fare. Cloudflare’s worker AI stuff to build a dashboard and added insights via AI into the dashboard. I thought that was an amazing idea. So I took my, just my one simple chart, took the exact same data, uh, and passed it to Gemini. And so now I have this web page that has a nice chart on top, but if you’re like a CTO and just like, I don’t want to look at a chart, that’s too much work, uh, it has stuff like, you know, donut sales are going up, uh, banana sales are going down, apples are going up until the fall, whatever, uh, Stuff like that.Um, again, a big, huge thank you to her because it’s awesome. I think to kind of mix those different, um, ways of showing data, um, on, on, on one web