Hey everyone,

In September I attended REST Fest and API World. Here’s a couple of presentations I enjoyed, and links to my own talks.

REST Fest

Adam Kliment showed a cool little project called “Restful JSON”. Restful JSON is a formalized naming convention for URLs in JSON. I’m a big fan of standardizing small, composable pieces of JSON. Maybe next we can standardize forms or pagination.

Joshua T. Kalis discussed LuxUI which tackles the idea of a generating a web UI from hypermedia controls. I love seeing more people explore this idea. Django and Rails have automatic administration tools for their frameworks, maybe this can bring us closer to a more generic API solution.

My talk this year discussed two specific API design strategies Vimeo uses for video privacy.

REST Fest is always full of great talks. I recommend digging into all of this years videos.

API World

Mike Stowe presented a project called REST API multiple-request chaining. This project aims to standardize a JSON format that combines many http requests into a single request. We experimented with something similar at Vimeo to speed up web pages and mobile apps, but this project is a much more mature solution. I’m going to watch it evolve, and learn from his findings.

I was unable to attend Dan Schafer’s presentation on GraphQL, but we spoke later in the day. It was great to cut through the hype and hear architectural opinions right from the source. Our discussion reinforced my belief that GraphQL is a great solution to some very specific problems, but the hype is encouraging misuse.

API World did not record the presentations this year, but you can watch a previous recording of Dan’s presentation here.

I also spoke at API World about developer experience, and how to manage your API as your company changes. My slides are available here.

API Strat

I will also be at API Strategy and Practice this week. Track me down and say hi, I want to know how you are using and building APIs.

If you are not attending this year, reach out to me on Twitter, I’m always happy to talk.