Hi, I’m Kevin — and I’m the QA Lead at CaptureProof. I spent the past few days at the ILoveAPIs – Digital Acceleration Conference. It’s the world’s largest networking and training event dedicated to APIs and digital business with three forums dedicated to developers, IT experts, and strategists. It was a great event – and for those who couldn’t be there, here’s a recap of my 4 favorite sessions:
1. Getting &*IT Done Apply agile, test-driven techniques to delivering on your API initiative
This was an interesting talk with Target and Swisscom about their API development programs the initial struggle to get it started. Both companies saw the benefits from switching to APIs from point-to-point integrations as it provided a way to scale. Also with APIs, both companies were able to have data consistency across their platforms as well as see more opportunity for innovation.
2. Protecting Your APIs from Mobile Threats – Beyond OAuth and API Security
This was great session lead by Subra Kumaraswamy from Apigee and Caleb Sima from Bluebox where they talked about types of attacks and what are best practices to prevent attacks from succeeding. A lot of companies have prevention methods on their web platforms but often times the mobile platforms are overlooked.
3. High Performance Climb Innovating While Moving Fast
This was probably my favorite panel of the whole conference. John Foley talked about his journey to and flying as a Blue Angel and how to reach high levels of performance. Belief, he said, is the most important factor when a company is trying to perform well. Only when employees believe in the value the company is trying to provide will high level of performance be obtained. The timing of this presentation could not have been better as Fleet Week had just wrapped up the previous weekend.
4. How Hyperconnected Consumers Are Transforming Healthcare
“People check their mobile phones on average of 150 times a day”. A panel of speakers from different healthcare companies shared their experiences and anecdotes of how technology was and is connecting consumers and transforming healthcare. Some companies talked about their approach being to empower the patients first, which in turn will empower the providers. While others suggested the reverse – putting the providers first.
Overall ILoveAPIs was a great conference. I’m looking forward to next year already!