Whether you are building for the web, mobile, or devices yet to be invented, the enabling technology behind them are APIs. In this introductory talk, I will introduce APIs, describe what makes them possible, the process for creating APIs and supporting them.

A few months ago, I gave an introductory talk on building APIs to a diverse audience of programmers. While I assumed that the talk content was accessible, designing and building APIs are a lot harder than that.

Audience

CodeCore is an intensive eight week training course that helps kick start your web development career. The first two cohorts were on Ruby on Rails for novice programmers, though now they’ve branched out to teaching Scala and Wordpress.

The challenge for junior programmers (or anyone graduating from a similar bootcamp) is that companies won’t trust such a person with their core code base.

While brainstorming with the founders of CodeCore Tam and Jay, we thought it would be valuable for me to talk about how to consume APIs (basically build mashups.) The advantages of this are:

• your code is standalone and not a part of the core code base
• the business owner can see a clear return on investment per integration (more integrations with other APIs out there, the more valuable their platform becomes for prospective and existing customers.)
• a great way to get your foot in the door

I feel this is a great way for these students to pitch themselves to employers, and convince them that there’s a clear payoff to taking a risk on them.

Come attend my talk on Friday, April 25, 2014.

Photo Credit: tribehut.