Developer Programs and APIs in the News – Volume 1, Number 8

In today’s interconnected world, companies in all industries need to publish APIs and cultivate a developer community to access and use them. To be competitive today, attracting and supporting developers is essential. The key to cultivating a vibrant developer community that uses your APIs and supports your platform is a good developer relations program. “Developer Programs and APIs in the News” is a series of news items from developer programs around the world.

Developer Programs and APIs in the News

Netflix – December 5 – NetFlix announces a new Open Source project called Hollow – “Hollow is a java library and comprehensive toolset for harnessing small to moderately sized in-memory datasets which are disseminated from a single producer to many consumers for read-only access. Hollow shifts the scale … datasets for which such liberation may never previously have been considered can be candidates for Hollow.”

OpenAI.com – December 5 – Openai.com releases Universe – Universe is “a software platform for measuring and training an AI’s general intelligence across the world’s supply of games, websites and other applications. Universe allows an AI agent to use a computer like a human does: by looking at screen pixels and operating a virtual keyboard and mouse. We must train AI systems on the full range of tasks we expect them to solve, and Universe lets us train a single agent on any task a human can complete with a computer.”

Amazon AWS – December 1 – Introducing AWS X-Ray: See Inside of Your Distributed Application – “We have made it possible for you to trace requests from beginning to end across all of the touch-points that I just mentioned. It addresses the problems that come about when you want to understand and improve distributed systems at scale, and gives you the information and the insights that you need to have in order to do this.” Developers can use Node.js, Java, C# .NET, and AWS Lambda function (any programming language).

GE Digital – December 1 – Minds + Machines 2016 Hackathon Recap – “On Tuesday, November 15 at Minds + Machines 2016, 18 teams competed in a Predix Hackathon showcasing the power of the platform. The GE Developer Relations team was excited to partner with GE Energy Connections, GE Power, Intel, and the GE Digital Foundries to host the very first Hackathon specifically for the yearly event. Overall, 85 developers attended the Hackathon and delivered 18 outstanding hacks, completely packing the house.”

Facebook – November 30 – Instant Games Now Available on Messenger and Facebook News Feed – “Instant Games, launching in closed beta, opens up a unique opportunity for game developers to lower the friction for people to discover and instantly enjoy playing games without having to install new apps. Using only one build that will run in web view, developers can easily deploy their Instant Games across multiple platforms to reach the 1.79 billion people on Facebook, as well as 1 billion people on Messenger. Facebook News Feed posts also include the Instant Play call-to-action to help drive distribution and discovery of new games.”

Google – November 30 – Customize your G Suite experience with App Maker and Recommended apps – “App Maker is a low-code, application development tool that lets you quickly build and deploy custom apps tailored to your organization’s needs. Whether you’re looking for better ways to onboard new team members, staff projects, or approve employee travel requests, App Maker helps you build an app for that in days instead of months.”

SYNQ – November 29 – Synq announces their Cloud Video API for Developers – “Our flexible video API enables developers to create new scalable video services, or move existing solutions in hours. We offer extensive and easy to use documentation and a range of code libraries. Create new scalable video services, or move existing solutions in hours.”

GitHub – November 28 – Preview the new Organization Memberships APIs – “We’re releasing new endpoints and changes to existing endpoints to better help you administer your GitHub organizations and repositories.” New endpoints include: Review a user’s permission level, List outside collaborators, Remove an outside collaborator Convert a member to an outside collaborator List pending organization invitations and List pending team invitations.

Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Linux Foundation – November 16 – Microsoft contributes to open ecosystem by joining Linux Foundation and welcoming Google to the .NET community – Microsoft Corp. unveiled a series of products and partnerships that strengthen the company’s Azure cloud platform for building intelligent, cross-platform apps and services. Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie detailed significant steps Microsoft is taking to empower the ecosystem by giving developers greater choice in the tools they use — including joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum Member to better collaborate with the open source community, welcoming Google to the independent .NET Foundation, and working with Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. to enable .NET developers to build apps for more than 50 million Samsung devices worldwide.

Intercom – November 15 – Connecting developers and customers with the new Intercom Developer Program – “Today we’re launching our new Developer Program, which recognizes and promotes quality integrations. The Program will help our customers discover and use integrations built by the community, as well as helping us better support you, the developers building them. Today more than 13,000 businesses use Intercom to connect with a billion people worldwide.”

Airobotics – November 14 – Airobotics Launches Developer Program to Create an App Store for Automated Drones – “Airobotics, a global leader in fully automated industrial drones, is announcing the launch of its official developer program, a new initiative that provides third-parties with the ability to design and develop software that will be integrated into and operated by its drone platform. With this announcement, Airobotics is opening the first ‘App Store for Industrial Drones’, for which any developer or company may develop software utilizing Airobotics’ automated drone platform.”

Send me your Developer Programs News!

If you have news about your Developer Relations Program, send me an email about the news.

David I - Developer Relations Conference

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99