What Are Your Professional Interests?

Mike Adams

Reflecting on professional interests

I recently read Supremacy by Parmy Olson, about the race to commercialise Generative AI. One thing that struck me was how both Demis Hassabis, the British entrepreneur behind DeepMind, and Sam Altman, the American entrepreneur behind OpenAI, started their ventures without a specific commercial goal. They were driven by curiosity and possibility. The money and commercialisation only came later, once they became allied with — and partly absorbed by — the giants of Big Tech, Google and Microsoft.

That made me stop and think: What would it look like to pursue professional interests purely for their own sake, without the constraints of short-term business goals?

Because if I’m honest, I sometimes feel that companies hold us back. Too often, we’re asked to do trivial tasks when we could be tackling bigger problems — problems that might transform an organisation, or even make the world a better place.

So here’s the question I’ve been asking myself, and that I think is worth asking you too:

👉 What are your professional interests? And what have you done to pursue them?

I don’t mean career goals. I mean the kinds of problems you would want to solve regardless of your job title, employer, or current role.

For me personally, they fall into the convergence of three areas:

  • APIs and integrations — this has been the backbone of my professional life: as a product manager, strategist, technical writer, protocol designer, coder, and standards contributor. Connecting systems and making them work together has always fascinated me, and it remains one of the most powerful ways to solve real problems.

  • Technical communication — this has always been a strength of mine, but also a craft I’ve worked hard to improve. Over time I’ve come to realise that communication isn’t just a “supporting function” in engineering — it’s fundamental. It’s how knowledge flows, how problems are framed, and how teams and technologies align.

  • Developments in AI — right now, AI feels like an inflection point. It’s creatively stimulating to see how we can apply new tools to old problems, and I find it exciting to experiment with what this means for engineering, product design, and technical writing.

And when I think about industries, two stand out for me:

  • Hospitality & Travel — while I’ve worked across multiple industries including Defence, Pharmaceutical, Business Planning, and Events, I’ve spent longer in Hospitality technology than any other. I know the problems, I’ve seen them first-hand, and I have a lot of practical history to draw on. It resonates with me as a space that’s both complex and full of opportunity.

  • Embedded Finance — fintech is impossible to ignore; it’s a huge growth area, and the overlaps with APIs and technical communication are fascinating. The ability to embed financial services directly into other industries creates entirely new possibilities, and I find that intersection particularly rich.

This morning I wrote down a backlog of potential blog posts. I’m not blogging a lot right now, but one reason is that I always have too many topics in play. Many of these posts are just small windows into larger projects I’m working on — and I need to get better at sharing that work in progress on GitHub.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s currently on my list:

  • How to build API Docs in 2025
  • Measuring the effectiveness of your API Docs
  • Integrations product strategy
  • A universal Hospitality Schema
  • A Hospitality MCP Profile
  • Making APIs AI-ready
  • n8n for AI Agents
  • The impact of AI on technical writing
  • Agile and integrations
  • API versioning
  • Developer Experience
  • AI use cases for Hospitality & Travel
  • Fintech vs Open Finance vs Embedded Finance
  • Reverse engineering the domain model
  • Why your API Docs won’t be like Stripe
  • Company culture as an obstacle to solving problems
  • Will AI ever be conscious?
  • …and plenty more.

Some of these will turn into full posts. Others may evolve into something else entirely. But putting them out there feels like a way of declaring my intent.

So I’ll close with the same question I started with:

👉 What are your professional interests? And what are you doing to pursue them?