Frontstack Event Recap — How to Use APIs
On Saturday 24th February, we had our second ever Frontstack event. For those that don’t know, Frontstack is a conference started by Christian Nwamba and F.Merry, and myself, Ire Aderinokun, with the mission to grow the developer ecosystem by creating exposure to front-end technologies. Despite the large amount of technology conferences in Nigeria and Africa, we noticed there was still a gap in knowledge specific to frontend development, and decided to solve this with Frontstack.
Following on from our first event, which was about Responsive Web Design, in this second event we decided to cover the topic of how to use APIs as a frontend developer.
What happened?
We started off the event by hearing from the winners of the Responsive Web Design Hackathon we held after the last event. Thanks to our sponsor Cloudinary, we were able to award Google Home’s to Adewale Abati ♠ and Tejumade Afonja.
Introduction to APIs
After hearing from the hackathon winners, we started our first session with an Introduction to APIs, delivered by first-time speaker Emmanuel AKINDE. He travelled all the way from Ile-Ife for this talk, and gave us a great foundation on the elements of REST.
REST Codelab
Next, as we always like to do at our meetups, we got practical in a REST API Codelab led by Ire Aderinokun. After first going through the elements of the Fetch Web API, we built a sample application, using the Paystack API, which could be used to send invoices and accept payments.
The Magic of Firebase
Next up, we had F.Merry speak on the advantages of Firebase for Frontend developers. We learnt about how Firebase’s Realtime Database can be used to create a “serverless” application, using F.Merry’s real-world shomolu.rocks application as an example.
Introducing GraphQL
Finally, in our last session of the day, Timi Ajiboye gave us an introduction to Facebook’s GraphQL, as an alternative to REST. We learned about the advantages of GraphQL, and how it can make the work of the frontend developer much easier and more streamlined.
All slides, code examples, and other information for the event can be found on our forum.
We would like to say a huge thank you to our sponsors: Google, Paystack, Cloudinary, and the Zone Tech Park. We couldn’t have put on this event without them!
Note: Unfortunately, the images taken of the event by our photographer were lost due to a memory card malfunction.
