Keeping The API Conversation Moving Forward At The Gluecon APIStrat Un-Workshops

I’m still gathering my thoughts from the deep technical conversations that occurred on Tuesday at the Gluecon APIStrat Un-Workshops in Colorado. Before the official Gluecon festivities kicked off, 3Scale and API Evangelist held a 5 hour un-workshop where approximately 70 API professionals gathered to discuss some of the most pressing topics in the API space.

Internet of Things
One of the fastest growing areas of the API design and deployment, is in support of the Internet of things (IoT). During the IoT portion we had some interesting conversation around how APIs enable communication in Iot world, including some heated discussion about whether or not HTTP will scale and handle the fast growing Iot space.

API Versioning
One of the hot topics proposed within the API design un-workshop was API versioning, which I thought would be a technical dive into versioning, but ended up being more of the human side of versioning, and communicating with your API consumers—clearly setting expectations around the how and why of API versioning.

Real-Time
Dovetailing nicely with the Iot discussion, there was a very enlightening discussion around real-time, which covered one of the most fundamental issues of real-time—what is it? As with the API versioning discussion, the conversation took gave a nod to the human side of tech, acknowledging real-time was more about expectations of end-users and providers, than about technology.

API Copyright
As expected the topic of API copyright was a major part of the discussion, not just at the APIStart Un-workshops, but also the wider Gluecon. A group of us walked through the legal case, where everything stands with API Commons, and how we can best take the offensive attack on the issue as a community, which includes educating more API providers, consumers and business owners.

API Design & Discovery
Emphasizing the importance of the release of APIs.json and APIs.io, and the conversations around API Commons, a portion of the API design workshop walked through the available API definition formats, and ultimately how APIs are discovered. The conversation went beyond classic API directories, and the newer approaches to search introduced by APIs.io, and discussed IDE integration for API discovery, as well as in the Internet of Things—again showing the overlap of all the areas of discussion at APIStrat Un-workshops.

The APIStrat Un-workshops were broken into two main groups, API design and Internet of things, while each of the un-workshops started with lightning talks from relative providers, the rest of the un-workshops were just open conversations around a table between all participants—making them very organic discussions.

If you didn’t get a chance to participate at Gluecon, the conversations will continue online with blot posts from each of the group leaders in the discussions on API Evangelist, as well as at API Strategy & Practice, where we will be structuring sessions, panels and more workshops to keep the dialogue going.