Jan Vlnas
Prague, Czechia
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The (API) gateway to hell: Fixing a decade of poor API design decisions
What happens when you add an API gateway in front of a decade-old monolith serving thousands of partners? At Mews, we discovered our APIs were being used in ways we never imagined.
Our backend is (in)famously a monolithic application, and while this architecture served us well, it no longer scales for us. To improve our partner-facing API infrastructure, we decided to decouple authorization and rate limiting from the monolith by introducing an API gateway.
In this talk, I’ll share why this seemingly straightforward change became a significant challenge – from dealing with our non-standard API design patterns to discovering how our overly lenient backend stack had created hidden dependencies. You’ll learn about the technical hurdles we faced, how we resolved them, and what we are taking forward for the design of our future APIs.
Let’s dive into ActivityPub: Protocol for the social web and beyond
What do WordPress, GitLab, Threads by Meta, Ghost, and Flipboard have in common? They all embraced ActivityPub, a standardized protocol for federated content distribution. Popularized by Mastodon, it’s a key part of Fediverse, an open network of interoperable social networking applications. However, ActivityPub’s potential extends beyond social media.
In this talk, Jan will take a deep dive into how (and why) ActivityPub works and how you can take advantage of it (or at least some of its parts) in your product.
Why your API doesn’t solve my problem: A use case-driven API design
You wrote an API specification, documented your endpoints, and published SDKs. Here’s a question, though: Does your API actually solve your users’ problems?
API providers often fail to address common use cases to solve users’ needs, or their assumptions don’t match the reality. This may end up in frustration and loss of users.
In this talk, we will take a peek into developers’ mindset. I will show how to better understand the developers’ needs by researching the usage patterns, existing libraries and 3rd party experience layers, provide examples of good and bad practices, and suggest actionable steps to improve developer experience for your API.
What senior developers have (not) told you
When you work with code, do you sometimes feel like forcing a square peg through a round hole? Despite following all the best practices, your solution doesn't feel right?
We learn from the code we are exposed to. Often we internalize many patterns and practices without a second thought – sometimes to our disadvantage. We take them for a given, perhaps we assume our senior colleagues know better, perhaps we are afraid to ask.
In this beginner-friendly session, I will share tips and tricks for building your own intuition about dealing with code organization, testing, and maintenance. And perhaps even challenge some deeply held views and assumptions.
Code samples presented will be in JavaScript.
API World 2022 Sessionize Event
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