About a year ago I wrote a blog post entitled Be API First. It was inspired by a great chat with a SoundCloud developer and my frustration with the mobile-first hype. So when I heard about APIdays, a conference targeted at developers and companies with APIs, I jumped at the opportunity to attend.
Firstly, as the resident developer at Silicon Allee, I’ll get you up to speed with the technobabble. API stands for Application Programming Interface. It is a simple code interface that exposes features of a website or online service for other websites, apps or devices to use. For example, whenever you tweet a photo from your iPhone, Apple is using Twitter’s API to send that hilarious photo of your cat to your followers.
APIdays is a two-day conference and celebration of these forward thinking companies and the developers that connect them. The focus is not only on exposing developers to APIs but teaching them to build and, more importantly, sell and market their APIs. With the trend of investors favouring founders with a development background, these skills are invaluable. And, if developers have to learn about those “dirty words … business development, sales, and marketing” as Adam DuVander of Sendgrid joked, at least they got to hear them from their peers.
Nestled in the top floor of Berlin’s betahaus, the conference was very well attended with a healthy mix of software developers and companies’ developer evangelists (or advocates). The developers were their typical reserved selves, but still gave hearty applause for a wide array of international speakers.
The event’s organiser, Robin Römer, set out to “bring the very active but fragmented Berlin developer meetup community together” under one roof and was thrilled with the turnout. “We sold out early and never expected such a big response having only two months to organise the event,” he added.
With further events scheduled for Barcelona, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo and San Francisco, you can catch the roadshow when it rolls into a town near you on it’s self-described ‘Global Tour.’ APIdays is shaping up to be a must-attend conference for anyone looking to build a future-proof tech company.
Photo courtesy Commercetools/Dirk Hoerig