It’s not about the APIs, but about the value the APIs bring - a quick recap of APIdays Australia 2016
It’s not about the APIs, but about the value the APIs bring - a quick recap of APIdays Australia 2016
Created on 2016-03-03 00:11
Published on 2016-03-03 02:53
I’m back at “the office” after having spent the last 2 days at APIdays and I’m feeling inspired & reflective. So inspired, I’m going to put down some thoughts about the event.
APIdays is the largest Australian conference dedicated to the business and technology of Web APIs. It brings together business leaders, entrepreneurs and technologists to discuss, collaborate and learn about building the platforms that support new business models.
This is the 2nd time it has been run in Australia, first time in Melbourne
The program promised “2 days, 5 keynotes, 3 streams, more than 50 speakers, workshops & exhibits”, and it certainly delivered on that. Oh, and I was one of the 50 speakers, but more about that later…
The days kicked off with 2 memorable keynotes - first up was Steve Sammartino, with a talk entitled “Welcome To Startup Land - What Big Companies Must Learn From Startups” taking us on a 200+ year journey from the industrial to the technological ages, reminding us we all live/work in boxes and will eventually end up in a box at the end of it all.
Following Steve, James Bligh (wearing an awesome T-shirt) took us through the Digital Innovation happening in the NAB, a 150 year old bank. This was of particular interest to me, as I have been a NAB customer for a good third of that time! James has lead the work over the part 5 years, and when he said ""We don’t have an API strategy. We have a customer strategy… APIs are the best way to reach the customer.”, it made me feel good that it is my bank!
APIs as a means to an end? Excellent! That’s been part of my pitch too. And this become the theme for the remaining 2 days across the different speakers.
Following opening keynotes, we had a coffee break before the 3 tracks kicked off. It’s kinda hard to be in 3 places at once, so twitter become the way to keep track of all the concurrent sessions - and to make it easier to recap, I compiled all those tweets into a Storify story .
The afternoon was a flurry of sessions, discussions and the odd coffee or two.
The day finished with a closing keynote by Mike Amundsen which brought everyone back together. Mike session was titled ” API: The “I” Stands for Innovation ” and took us on a journey of discovery that included ships, a trip to south pole, planes, innovators of the middle-ages, ant colonies, learning, chaos, wildcards and experimentation, and it all lead to a great conclusion about the API journey we are all undertaking - BTW the presentation is available online
End of day 1 was then celebrated with some cocktails and canapes.
Day 2 saw another pair of keynotes to start us off.
First up we had Steve Wilmott , CEO & founder of 3scale . Steve is an API luminary of the highest order. Steve was talking platform — ” Entering the Platform Age: How to create genuine value for Internal and External API Consumers ”. He included a live demo with an Amazon Echo - now this isn’t available in Australia just yet, but I’ve also been able to get my hands on one, and I do love it. The demo was fun, but for me the key was a slide with the following statement :
"The
API is not the key thing - the
value delivered by the API is the key thing”.
Yup. Agreed!
Steve’s slides are online too. Oh, and there was another little highlight (for me at least), Steve quoted me! (you can see it on slide #25)
Which reminds me. I haven’t covered how my talk went. I was up on day one, at 4:15pm. I went good. really good. I told the story about APIs at Telstra. It’s a good story, and it deserves a post of it’s own, but here’s a photo where i fondle an invisible melon!
The second keynote on Day 2 was by Andrew Cuttler from SoftwareAG (yeah, I know, right), “APIs - centre of the universe, or edge of the galaxy?”. Andrew really geeked out, as he used Zeetings to deliver his session, gave us a lesson on Egyption mythology, showed us a heat map of his travels, displayed his pin & bank account number, and shared his obsession with baby Blakes’ poopy and wet diaper! Very entertaining.
The rest of the day was a blur, as we jumped between sessions such ” From Zero to Hyper in 30 minutes: Live Coding a Hypermedia Client ”, ” The Art of Visually Meshing Microservices Together ”, ” APIs for Effective Communications ”, ” Fitting APIs into the enterprise: business cases, governance, and culture ”, ” API or die trying ”, ” IOT and APIs - Bringing business to life outside the office ”, ” The Art of Developer Relations ” … so many other sessions I wanted to get to… will wait for the videos…
I cant finish without thanking the fantastic team behind the event - Saul , Yamen and the many good folks from Sixtree were just fantastic. Great work! And I also have to add the delightful Mehdi Medjaoui , founder of APIDays without which none of this would have been possible! My final thanks is to developersteve , aka Steve Cooper who’s amazing photos I have used in the post!!
So, there you have it. 2 days of API awesomeness, where the message was clear - APIs are the ends to the means to deliver something of value. Embrace them!