Paul Hill

REST/Hypermedia architect

Paul Hill is a software architect, designer and developer at KIXEYE, and resident expert on all things ReST and Hypermedia. An enterprise Java developer for most of his career he is now very much a polyglot paratrooper, spending most of his time designing and building APIs with Node.js to provide delightful features to KIXEYE's online competitive gaming community. Paul grew up as a beach bum in New Zealand where he survived surfing a 20 foot storm surge in a lightning storm, nearly being eaten by a mako shark, rolling heavy machinery into a lake, hundreds of people pummelling him thousands of times to acquire a belt that won't hold his pants up, snowboarding on an active volcano, and 3 motorcycle accidents. He then moved to the UK to survive dodging bullets with the british paratroopers, nearly being gored by a bull in Spain, jumping off a perfectly good bridge in Greece, having a thousand tomatoes thrown at him at once, and having terrorists blow up his ride to work in London. So he moved to BC, Canada to settle down, where he narrowly avoided being eaten by a grizzly bear. Witness the miracle that is the continued survival of Paul Hill. @paulwilliamhill

All Your API Are Belong to Us
Track: Everything as a Service (XaaS) - Web APIs

Location:

Abstract:
Recently a small team at KIXEYE was tasked with a ground-up rebuild of the KIXEYE platform API and web properties with high expectations (millions of active players), and short timelines (from concept to delivery of features in days). This is not a lesson about how to build the perfect hypermedia API. This is a story about going to battle with difficult deadlines and deliverables and winning the day.

We built a hypermedia API supporting thousands of requests per second, taking full advantage of the benefits of an asynchronous architecture (Node.js), bi-directional persistent communication channels (websockets), and the performance and flexibility of a document data store (MongoDB) while retaining standards based data validation (JSON-Schema v4), transactional control and error handling (Promises), dynamic documentation (Swagger), efficient caching (Memcached & Varnish), and ease of maintenance (Hypermedia ReST).

We'll discuss what technology survived contact with the enemy, and what didn't. Join me for a survival guide to building respectable APIs under fire.