Tyk Is Conducting API Surgery Meetups

I was having one of my regular calls with the Tyk team as part of our partnership, discussing what they are up to these days. I’m always looking to understand their road map, and see where I can discover any stories to tell about what they are up to. A part of their strategy to build awarness around their API management solution that I found was interesting, was the API Surgery event they held in Singapore last month, where they brought together API providers, developers, and architects to learn more about how Tyk can help them out in their operations.

API surgery seems like an interesting evolution in the Meetup formula. They have a lot of the same elements as a regular Meetup like making sure there was pizza and drinks, but instead of presentations, they ask folks to bring their APIs along, and they walk them through setting up Tyk, and deliver an API management layer for their API operations. If they don’t have their own API, no problem. Tyk makes sure there are test APIs for them to use while learning about how things work. Helping them understand how to deliver API developer onboarding, documentation, authentication, rate limiting, monitoring, analytics, and the other features that Tyk delivers.

They had about 12 people show up to the event, with a handful of business users, as well as some student developers. They even got a couple of new clients from the event. It seems like a good way to not beat around the bush about what an API service provider is wanting from event attendees, and getting down to the business at hand, learning how to secure and manage your API. I think the Meetup format still works for API providers, and service providers looking to reach an audience, but I like hearing about evolutions in the concept, and doing things that might bring out a different type of audience, and cut out some of the same tactics we’ve seen play out over the last decade.

I could see Meetups like this working well at this scale. You don’t need to attract large audiences with this approach. You just need a handful of interested people, looking to learn about your solution, and understand how it solves a problem they have. Tyk doesn’t have to play games about why they are putting on the event, and people get the focus time with a single API service provider. Programming language meetups still make sense, but I think as the API sector continues to expand that API service provider, or even API provider focused gatherings can also make sense. I’m going to keep an eye on what Tyk is doing, and look for other examples of Meetups like this. It might reflect some positive changes out there on the landscape.

Disclosure: Tyk is an API Evangelist partner.