APIdays Paris 2018 Conference
APIdays Paris is one of the most renowned tech conferences in Europe. My colleague and I attended the latest conference in December 2018. Since 2012 the conference has grown in size and reputation with the aim of democratizing and evangelizing about the use of APIs for corporations and businesses. In other words it is the place where the latest developments on APIs are discussed and where contribution is encouraged. A clear example of this was the The new API stack warmup talk where OpenAPI initiative member Mike Ralphson discussed the state of this open-source specification in 2018.
Day 1 was all about making connections. Various companies had their stands set up to promote their API-related services. These ranged from specialist companies such as Kong promoting their dedicated API gateway product to Microsoft explaining how to use their Azure platform to build and utilise serverless API technology. Serverless is an alternative to the microservice architecture in which there are no servers to provision or manage but instead you are provided some code execution time on a server managed by a cloud provider. This service takes your functions as input, performs logic, returns your output, and then shuts down.
In my opinion the most interesting talk of the day was by Arnaud Lauret, who discussed the general use of everyday APIs. As Arnaud explained, when creating an API one should keep in mind the following traits:
Purpose — The API should be focused on the right purpose. It should be simple and clear to use without exposing any unnecessary internal information.
Usability — Should be designed with people in mind since developers will be the primary users of the API. It should return just the right amount of information to understand what is happening but at the same time avoid returning any unnecessary data.
Consistency — Consistency makes APIs easy to use since their behaviour is expected. Having consistent internal APIs has the advantage of allowing the sharing of common features between different company APIs.
Adaptability — Allow customization options such as pagination, sorting and filtering. When providing API support your service should be localized to offer the best possible experience for a global audience.
Discoverability — Metadata such as the current page and using options data to indicate what methods are allowed.
This new found knowledge gave me reassurance that we had taken the correct decisions when designing our suite of microservice APIs at Catena Media and also led me to rethink some APIs I had written in the past.
I highly suggest watching the whole presentation here.
On the second day a significant number of talks were dedicated toward GraphQL with speakers from Github and Netflix talking about their experience with this relatively new technology and how it is helping them improve their development cycle.
Some of the advantages of GraphQL include:
- The ability to deprecate fields without having to release a new API version
- Getting data from multiple domains using just one endpoint collaboratively
- Less data is passed by reducing payload
- Easier for frontend developers since there is no need for them to learn how to manage servers. The heavy-lifting of query resolution (such as sorting and filtering) will be performed by GraphQL which means that developers can spend less time implementing such features.
We have been using GraphQL at Catena Media for over a year now. This has enabled our front-end developers to perform queries such as sorting and filtering in a relatively short amount of time since the heavy lifting is performed by GraphQL.
A number of workshops were held during the day, with one by Postman showing off some tricks and the latest features available. One such feature is Team Workspaces which enables developers to debug requests and API usage collaboratively. It allows team members to easily collaborate and share their Collections, Environments, Integrations, History, Mocks and more. Other interesting features mentioned include mock testing APIs before the actual endpoint is built and using environmental variables to enable the reusability of requests.
With over 80 topics covered over the 2 days there was something for everyone. The sheer number of companies and people present also made it a great place for networking both at the venue and also at the various unofficial events held after the conference. I highly recommend this to any developer who would like to keep themselves up to date with the latest developments and ideas in the API world.
For more from Catena Media, have a look at the Product Team and Design articles.
http://product.catenamedia.com
http://design.catenamedia.com
