API Design First: Succeeding with API Governance

Modern HTTP APIs run the contemporary tech world. As a result, every organization is now required to produce and consume APIs in some way. The need for your organization to productively design, build, deploy and operate RESTful APIs is higher than it has ever been for you to stay competitive. Developing the processes and tools to design and deliver hundreds of APIs within your organization is fraught with manual checkpoints and inconsistencies. This friction makes standard API Governance slow, uncollaborative, and non-iterative. To succeed in building modern APIs in the enterprise, you will need both an effective and productive API Governance strategy to support your API Design First processes.

In this talk, we will dive into the principal areas of the API Design lifecycle as we discuss how to succeed with API Governance using non-traditional approaches including collaboration, stewardship, and automation. Real-world examples from SPS Commerce, off-the-shelf tooling, and custom solutions will drive our journey through API Standards, Design, Development, and Publishing to demonstrate highly productive API Design First capabilities to rally your teams around.

The Ultimate Guide to Azure Pipelines Governance and Reuse

Azure DevOps Pipelines is one of the most popular CI/CD tools for software development with cloud-based deployments. It is a mature platform with over 15 years of experience that is continuing to evolve with many productivity benefits for the Enterprise. By harnessing the extension points of Azure Pipelines you can take an already great cloud-based platform and mold it into an incredible developer experience that significantly enhances developer productivity and streamlines the adoption of best practices in your organization.

In this session, we will start by exploring the history and capabilities of Azure Pipelines. We will dive into the most effective ways you can supercharge your pipelines by applying reuse, governance, and best practices throughout the enterprise. We will see how dramatically the productivity of an organization can be impacted through an Azure Pipelines real-world use-case.

Mastering GitHub: Beyond Source Control

GitHub needs no introduction as the world's premier source code repository. However, over the past several years GitHub has transformed well beyond a great tool for managing source code. It now provides a compelling one-stop-shop of capabilities as part of its platform that enables you to cut loose your disparate jungle of other tooling. Being aware of and learning how to effectively use this Swiss Army Knife of GitHub capabilities can substantially reduce your overall development costs while also reducing your team's cognitive overhead.

Join us for an exciting session where we dive deep into the GitHub toolchain, designed to supercharge developer productivity and unite your teams around a powerful engineering platform. Discover how to optimize pull request lifecycles with protected branch configurations, organizational rulesets, and merge queues. We'll also delve into security vulnerability detection using Dependabot and GitHub Advanced Security Code Scanning workflows that developers will love. Don't miss this opportunity to transform your development process and take your GitHub skills to the next level!

GitHub Pull Request Explosion: Leveraging Branch Protection, Merge Queues, Rulesets and Beyond

Remember when Pull Requests were simple? With GitHub's recent surge in features, setting up the perfect workflow might seem a bit daunting. But embracing these new tools can actually streamline the daily grind for developers. Join as we decode the latest in Branch Protection, Merge Queues, and Rulesets, turning potential complexity into your powerhouse of productivity.

Fortifying Your Codebase with GitHub

In a time where security tool sprawl is out of control, centralizing your security processes becomes not just a convenience but a necessity. GitHub's integrated toolset not only bolsters security but also significantly enhances the developer experience. Learn how to leverage the synergies of GitHub Advanced Security and Dependabot to protect your codebase while creating a streamlined, efficient, and enjoyable development workflow.

Feature Flagging at Scale: Considerations For Organizational Success

Feature flags can be transformative for organizations, but they're not a one-size-fits-all solution. As teams grow and projects expand, unique challenges arise. In this session, we'll explore the critical considerations organizations must keep in mind to ensure feature flagging paves the way for sustained success, offering insights at how SPS Commerce, the world’s largest retail network, has matured its feature flag adoption.

Maximize CI/CD Productivity: Reusable Templates with Azure Pipelines

With services and pipelines everywhere and the rise of internal developer platforms, you no longer have the luxury to copy and paste your CI/CD YAML between repositories. Learn how to craft reusable templates for your organization in Azure Pipelines to streamline onboarding, reduce errors, enable governance, and facilitate a smoother development pipeline with the ability to incrementally evolve and change over time.

API Essentials Toolkit: 10 Must-Have Tools for API Design and Management

In the rapidly evolving realm of API development, having the right tools is paramount for both efficient design and effective management. This presentation delves into a curated collection of indispensable tools that every API practitioner should be familiar with. Covering the full spectrum of the API Lifecycle we will talk about tools for design, development, consistency, governance, documentation, and team collaboration. Join to discover how this essential toolkit can empower your API journey, enhancing productivity and ensuring optimal performance throughout the API lifecycle.

Crafting Consistent APIs at Scale: Embracing Linting & Reusable Models

In an era where digital transformations drive business value, the importance of developing consistent, scalable, and robust APIs cannot be overstated. As teams expand and projects multiply, maintaining a unified API design can pose significant challenges. This presentation delves into the powerful combination of linting and reusable models as tools to navigate these challenges and ensure consistency across large-scale API designs.

We will explore API linting using the open-source Spectral project to enable teams to identify and rectify inconsistencies during design. In tandem we will navigate the need for reusable models, recognizing that the best specification is the one you don't have to write or lint at all! These two approaches not only facilitate the smooth integration of services but also foster collaboration across teams by providing a shared, consistent foundation.

Practical API Design First in Action

APIs are everywhere! Yet, designing APIs that are intuitive, evolvable, and developer-friendly remains a challenge. This workshop introduces the **API Design First** approach, which emphasizes collaboration, consistency, and exceptional developer experience by focusing on crafting your API contract before implementation. We’ll explore why API Design First matters, how it compares to the traditional Code First method, and how adopting this approach can transform the way teams build APIs.

Through interactive exercises, you’ll gain hands-on experience with OpenAPI, learning to craft "good" API contracts grounded in RESTful principles. You'll also dive into API Design Reviews, participating in mock sessions to understand how collaboration can elevate the quality and consistency of your designs. By experiencing proven API Design First practices, you’ll leave with a clear roadmap to enhance your own APIs and elevate your organization’s API program. Whether you’re a developer, architect, or product manager, this workshop equips you with the skills, tools, and mindset to create APIs that deliver lasting value and exceptional developer satisfaction.

Hands-on two-part workshop.

Crafting Quality APIs at Scale: Collaboration with API Design Reviews

Building high-quality APIs at scale requires more than technical expertise—it demands effective collaboration and a structured approach to design. API Design Reviews provide an approach that elevates API quality, ensures consistency, and drives alignment across teams. By bringing together stakeholders from diverse disciplines, design reviews foster thoughtful discussions that catch issues early, reduce rework, and create APIs that are intuitive and developer-friendly.

Building an Internal Developer Portal that Empowers Developers

Internal Developer Portals are revolutionizing how teams streamline workflows, enhance developer experience, and boost productivity. But for medium-sized organizations with limited resources, the path to success is unclear and fraught with challenges. Simply mimicking or using industry frameworks like Spotify Backstage might seem like a shortcut, but without a clear vision and strategy, it can lead to frustration and failure. This talk dives into how to build a successful Internal Developer Portal tailored to your unique needs. We'll explore critical steps: making a compelling business case, navigating the buy-versus-build dilemma, designing scalable architectures, driving adoption, and measuring impact in meaningful ways. Packed with actionable insights from SPS Commerce’s journey—the force behind the world’s largest retail network—you'll gain a roadmap to reduce cognitive load, empower your teams, and align your engineering practices with business goals. Whether you're starting fresh or refining an existing portal, this session will equip you to achieve big wins, even on a lean budget.

Unleashing Deploy Velocity with Feature Flags

A lot of development teams have built out fully automated CI/CD pipelines to deliver code to production fast! Then you quickly discover that the new bottleneck in delivering features is their existence in long-lived feature branches and no true CI is actually happening. This problem compounds as you start spinning up microservices and building features across your multi-repo architecture and coordinating some ultra-fancy release schedule so it all deploys together. Feature flags provide you the mechanism to reclaim control of the release of your features and get back to short-lived branches with true CI. However, what you're not told about feature flags in those simple "if/else" getting started demos is that there is an upfront cost to your development time, additional complexities, and some pitfalls to be careful of as you begin expanding feature flag usage to the organization. If you know how to navigate these complexities you will start to unleash true velocity across your teams.

In this talk, we'll get started with some of the feature flagging basics before quickly moving into some practical feature flagging examples that demonstrate its usage beyond the basic scenarios as we talk about UI, API, operations, migrations, and experimentation. We will explore some of the hard questions around "architecting feature flags" for your organization.

Compelling Code Reuse in the Enterprise

Sharing code and internal libraries across your distributed microservice ecosystem feels like a recipe for disaster! After all, you have always been told and likely witnessed how this type of coupling can add a lot of friction to a world that is built for high velocity. But I'm also willing to bet you have experienced the opposite side effects of dealing with dozens of services that have had the same chunks of code copied and pasted over and over again, and now you need to make a standardized, simple header change to all services across your platform; talk about tedious, frictional, error-prone work that you probably will not do! Using a variety of code-sharing processes and techniques like inner sourcing, module design, automated updates, and service templates, reusing code in your organization can be built as an asset rather than a liability.

In this talk, we will explore the architectural myth in microservices that you should NEVER share any code and explore the dos and don'ts of the types of reuse that you want to achieve through appropriate coupling. We will examine effective reuse patterns, including what a Service Template architecture looks like, while also spending time on the lifecycle of shared code and practically rolling it out to your services. We will finish it off with some considerations and struggles you are likely to run into introducing code reuse patterns into the enterprise.