Impressions from API Conference 2024

10 take aways and linked resources

API Conference: The Conference for Web APIs, API Design & Management, April 8 ‒ 11, 2024 | London

These notes come from from the first three days of devmio’s API Conference 2024. They are ordered chronologically.

1. Our “Patterns for API Design” (online article series #apidpotw, book) were well received in a full-day workshop (names, problems addressed, forces resolved…) that Daniel Lübke and I hosted. Thanks again everybody who attended!
2. Many API design guidelines exist, Erik Wilde collects such documents (and called for guidelines for guideline development).
3. API design advice not only comes in the form of patterns or guidelines, context and client requirements come first. For instance, Mike Amundsen starts with API stories, Arnaut Lauret suggests a goal-based design canvas, James Higginbotham uses job stories.
4. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and APIs have several relationships that go both ways, see keynote by David Roldán Martínez and talk by Matthias Biehl. David blogs about his keynote here (including slides!).
5. Many API linters exist, most of which seem to be operating on the OpenAPI specification level. There is an apilandscape category for them.
6. Mark Boyd presented a lightweight API governance model that integrates concepts such as paved road aka golden road and developer personas.
7. CDN now also stands for Compute Delivery Network, with API gateways and other software running at the edge (talk by Josh Twist).
8. Siemens has a rich API developer portal called Xcelerator that integrates a custom-trained version of ChatGPT.
9. Ikenna Nwaiwu has patterns for CI/CD of API products and uses a novel pattern template. And a book about this topic called “Automating API delivery”.
10. The conference was a great learning and networking opportunity! Next up: JAX in Mainz, we will hold our API design workshop again, this time in German.

This list is certainly incomplete (I did not attend the full conference, and sessions were running in parallel). You may want to join the discussion about the conference topics over on LinkedIn.

Many more resources and links to them are available on the website supporting our API design patterns book:

https://api-patterns.org/quickstart-resources

I hope you find this summary and link collection useful. Please clap for this story one or more time if you do 👏 😊

– Olaf (in role of co-author of “Patterns for API Design”)

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