A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "Rank The Services, Tools And Standards Companies Actually Adopt," Kin Lane, November 13, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/11/13/rank-the-services-tools-and-standards-companies-actually-adopt/
Marisol leads developer experience at a company that sells scheduling software, and her quick starts were written three years ago. She found the post on a Friday afternoon while avoiding a spreadsheet. Its opening question was one she had asked herself in planning meetings: "what is everyone else actually using?" She had always answered it the way the author admitted to doing, from memory and gut feel.
She read the three rankings slowly. Python at 1,436 companies, then Kubernetes at 1,214 and Node.js at 1,118. Her quick starts led with Node.js, then Python, and she felt a small flicker of defensiveness. Nobody had asked her to justify the order, but now there was a number next to it. She also noticed that the post says nothing about which of those companies were her customers. The counts describe the companies the author has profiled, not the people who sign up for her sandbox. She wrote that down as the first thing she would say if anyone tried to use this against her.
The services list interested her more. Claude was fifth at 1,438 companies, ahead of Azure at 1,174. She was a little uncomfortable with how quickly that made her want to add an AI section to the docs, because that is exactly the reflex the post warns about: things that got attention rather than things in use. Then she reached the passage on the gap between the two counts. Claude had 1,438 companies but only 429 through job postings, while Salesforce had 1,003 and 659. The author put it plainly: "Salesforce is something companies hire for. Claude is something companies use before they hire for it." She read that twice. It gave her a different way to think about her own roadmap, since some integrations get requested by procurement and others get requested by engineers who are already using them.
She liked that the author included the bad news. The standards list had Agile and Agile Methodology as separate entries at the same count, which the post calls "That is one thing counted twice". It also admitted that the response meta lacked the corpus and matcher it was supposed to name. Marisol trusted the rest of the post more for that, but she did not trust the data enough to rebuild anything on it. Counting companies is not the same as measuring what her customers need, and she said so to the empty meeting room.
She still wanted to see it for herself. The post said to walk the pages past the top ten, because "The long tail is where the interesting adoption stories are". The post also gave the REST call, so she opened a terminal and ran the tool ranking with a limit of ten. Python, Kubernetes and Node.js came back in the order the post described.
Then she opened a note titled for Thursday's planning meeting and pasted in the top three tools with their counts. Under them she wrote one line saying these were companies profiled by the author, not her customers, and that she would check her own sandbox signups against the list before changing the quick starts.