Track: Next Gen APIs: Designs, Protocols, and Evolution

Location: Broadway Ballroom North Center, 6th fl.

Day of week: Wednesday

Today, systems rely heavily APIs, whether it be a public APIs or internal APIs between microservices. In this track, we will highlight tools and techniques for public API design and evolution, as well as governance of APIs. We will also cover modern challenges of API design for microservices: binary vs. text-based protocols, debugging, and graph-based APIs.

Track Host:
Katharina Probst
Engineering Manager @Netflix

Katharina Probst leads engineering teams at Netflix. She is responsible for the Netflix API, which helps bring Netflix streaming to millions of people around the world. Prior to joining Netflix, she was in the cloud computing team at Google, where she saw cloud computing from the provider side. Her interests include scalable, distributed systems, APIs, cloud computing, and building effective and successful teams. She also holds a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

10:35am - 11:25am

by Chris Roche
Core Libraries Engineer @Lyft

by Christopher Burnett
Core Libraries Engineer @Lyft

With today's commonplace polyglot architectures, taming service APIs can be challenging. At Lyft, gRPC enforces a common protocol and types to solidify communication between backend services. How can we bring this same consistency to RESTful services and frontends?

In this talk, we will cover how we extended the Protocol Buffer (PB) IDL to create unified APIs and data models. From validation logic to automatic logging and statistics, PBs allow us to speed up development across our Go...

11:50am - 12:40pm

by Karthik Ramgopal
Application Infrastructure @LinkedIn

by Aditya Modi
Staff Software Engineer @LinkedIn

LinkedIn uses a unified API server to power our new flagship experience on all platforms (desktop web, mobile web, iOS and Android). The API and clients are released using a completely automated continuous release and deployment pipeline, to enable a rapidly evolving product.

We explore our original ideas behind API modeling, the challenges we’ve faced, and how we are evolving our modeling strategy over time based on our learnings. We will present a use-case study of building the...

1:40pm - 2:30pm

by Cameron Waeland
Software Engineer @Compass

At Compass we have seen a dramatic evolution in our API over the last 18 months. We have doubled the number of backend services we use and transitioned from a relative "mess" of different API programming patterns and technologies to a unified API architecture that is used across web and mobile. Along the way we have dramatically improved developer quality of life with improved API discoverability, consistency and maintainability.

In this talk, we will discuss our evolution - both the...

2:55pm - 3:45pm

by Bryan Kane
Software Engineer @Coursera

Coursera's platform is composed of hundreds of APIs, implemented across dozens of services by various engineering teams. Our client engineers have faced many challenges while using these APIs, especially around discoverability and assembly of data from various services. We’re working to solve these problems by migrating all client data access from REST to GraphQL.

Our path to GraphQL is different than most -- instead of manually adapting each of our REST APIs for GraphQL, we built a...

4:10pm - 5:00pm

by Mohamed El-Geish
Sr Director of Engineering @Workfit

When faced with a blank canvas and numerous API design decisions to make at the start of a new project or a new company, how does one go about that? Finding the design fit for APIs — private and public alike — is usually a pursuit aided by experience and reflections. In this talk, we explore lessons learned at big companies like Microsoft and LinkedIn, and adapt the insights drawn from them to fit a fast-growing startup.

API design choices for green-field projects subsume a wide...

Tracks

Monday, 26 June

Tuesday, 27 June

Wednesday, 28 June