REST API Notes for 2017/10/02
NEW FRONTIER SAME AS THE OLD FRONTIER
Last week I was at the API World conference. In his kickoff to the microservices workshop, Matt McLarty shared the presentation "New Frontiers for Microservices". A PDF of the deck is available on the conference website.
What I appreciated about Matt's talk is how he connected the present obsessions with software industry writing twenty, thirty, or even fifty years ago. The longer that I pull together these notes, the more I am convinced that there is very little that is truly new. The positive upshot of this is that history has a wealth of lessons to help guide us down well-trod paths. The cynical takeaway, however, is that most skip the history lessons in favor of blazing trails of their own-
-even if that trail is off a cliff.
API AWESOMENESS
At the same time that Matt was presenting at API World, his colleague, Erik Wilde, was presenting Achieving API Awesomeness at API Days, Zurich. While the slides are light on content without the spoken accompaniment, they do a good job of covering the basics that companies should consider when establishing API programs.
My talk at API World touched on related topics. I hope to have the slides, along with text, available before this time next week.
API... ESCAPE ROOMS?
I've got a number of tabs open for this week and, frankly, many of them are the minor variations on what has come before. One thing I don't think I've discussed nearly enough is the promotion of public APIs. After you've built something, how do you get developers using it? How do you get them excited about your product?
To that end, Nicolas Grenie has a great piece up about how he helped create the API Escape Room. Improving on the typical hackathon, the point of the API Escape Room is to maximize exposure to APIs, be as light of ask on the part of participants, and not conflict with other program content that might be, simultaneously, going on.
Has anyone else tried this approach to API promotion? If so, I'd love to hear about your experience, either as a participant or as an organizer.
MILESTONES
RUNSCOPE BOUGHT BY CA
At the end of last week Runscope announced it would be joining CA Technologies. According to the post by John Sheehan on the Runscope blog, the API test and monitoring tool had over 1,200 customers running 19 million checks every day. It is expected that the functionality will be integrated with existing CA products BlazeMeter, CA API Management (formerly Layer 7), and CA APM.
GRAPHQL RELICENSED
I had previously mentioned concern over Facebook's GraphQL license. On the 26th, writing on both Medium and code.facebook.com, Lee Byron announced the GraphQL specification was now relicensed under the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa). That pleased some of the original protesters. However, Bruce Perens, one of the co-founders of the official open source definition, is still concerned about portions of the specification that leave teams in unclear waters if they don't implement specific parts.
Once again, I am not a lawyer. After reading both sides, however, while the letter of the license agrees with Bruce, that doesn't seem to be the spirit. There were numerous enthusiastic people at API world with t-shirts emblazoned with "Ask Me About GraphQL!" They want people to adopt this stuff. Assuming the licensing is some kind of mustache-twirling diabolical gotcha seems like... a stretch.
WRAPPING UP
I've mentioned my Capital One colleague, Irakli Nadareishvili, in the past in relation to an exciting position that he is currently hiring for. He was also featured on Tech Target discussing how Capital One approaches microservices. Check if it out if you haven't gotten your weekly dose of microservice from this selection of notes.
Finally, have you checked out webapi.events? It is a small attempt to capture the latest in-person API events. If you know of an API conference, meetup, or hackathon not listed, let me know. I'd be glad to add it.
Til next time,
Matthew