by David I | May 30, 2017 | APIs, DevRelate, Webinar |
This week, I am presenting a DevRelate webinar, “Developer Relations and your Company’s APIs” on Wednesday (May 31) and Thursday (June 1). This blog post contains additional information and links covered in the webinar.
APIs and Your Company
Developer Relations and APIs
API Documentation Examples
API Versioning – Overview
REST
- URI
- Request parameter
- Media type (aka content negotiation & accept header)
- Date
- Custom request header
- Domain name
SOAP
- XML namespaces and XML comments
- UDDI version aware service registry
Shared Code Files
- Filename
- Version resource
API Resource Links
API Documentation Generation Tools
Additional Swagger Resources
The following Swagger related links were provided by SmartBear Software (thank you Keshav and Tracy)
- [Blog] API Design Best Practices – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-design/api-design-best-practices/
- [Blog] What is API Design, and Why it Matters – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-design/what-is-api-design/
- [Webinar] Scaling your API Design Process – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-design/scaling-your-api-design/
- [eBook] Optimizing the Swagger collaborative workflow using SwaggerHub – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-resources/optimize-your-swagger-api-workflow/
- [Blog] Design first or Code first approach to APIs – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-design/design-first-or-code-first-api-development/
- [Webinar] API Developer Experience (DX), and good documentation practices for good DX – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-documentation/api-documentation-and-developer-experience/
API Versioning – Examples
Facebook / Parse (BaaS) API Shutdown Example
Evans Data Developer Program Workshops and Assessments
If you have additional API links, best practices, tools, tips, tricks, thoughts and questions, send me an email.

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
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/
by David I | May 8, 2017 | Developer Outreach, Developer Programs News, Developer Relations, DevRelate |
Transact 2017 takes place this week in Las Vegas, Tuesday to Friday, May 9-12. Transact “is the one show focused solely on the business of payments. Powered by Electronic Transactions Association (ETA), the world’s largest payments industry trade group, it’s the place where innovators gather to make the deals that shape the industry”. The who’s who of FinTech companies will be on hand participating in keynote presentations, technical sessions, committee meetings, the exhibit hall and other special events.

FinTech companies at Transact 2017 along with links to their developer programs
Here is a partial list of companies participating at Transact 2017. The conference site has a complete list of exhibitors and presenters.
ETA Star Awards – Wednesday, May 10
On Wednesday night, the ETA Start Awards, sponsored by Visa, will showcase individuals and companies that impacted the payments industry in the past year. You can see the list of 2017 Star Award finalists and Innovation showcase awards.
Payments Pitch-Off & E-Pay Innovation Award – Thursday, May 11
Payments startups will demonstrate their products in front of a panel of judges. Sponsored by Vantiv, The selected startups will try to impress the judges with their new electronic payments technology product or service. The presentations will take place in front of an audience that will include the judging panel, FinTech media, investors and possible industry partners. The best new technology, product and/or service will be awarded the E-Pay Innovation Award of $25,000.
by David I | Feb 1, 2017 | APIs, Developer News, Developer Programs News, Developer Relations, DevRelate |
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
Google – January 31 – Google IO developer conference – May 17-19, 2017. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA – “Check back soon for more details.”
VoiceLabs – January 30 – VoiceLabs releases 4 new SDKs for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant – “We’re excited to roll out new VoiceLabs SDKs to support the entire ecosystem of voice developers. For Alexa: In addition to Node.js, Java and Python, you’ll find a new Ruby SDK and a modified Python SDK to support the Flask-ask platform. For Assistant: In addition to Node.js, there is now a Java SDK and a Python SDK.”
Microsoft – January 30 – Announcing .NET Core, .NET Native and NuGet Updates in VS 2017 RC – “We just released updates to the .NET Core SDK, .NET Native Tools and NuGet, all of which are included in Visual Studio 2017 RC. You can also install the .NET Core SDK for command-line use, on Windows, Mac and Linux.”
Amazon – January 30 – Excited about MXNet joining Apache! – “We have a significant team at Amazon working with the MXNet community to continue to evolve it. The team proposed MXNet joining the Apache Incubator to take advantage of the Apache Software Foundation’s process, stewardship, outreach, and community events. We’re excited to announce that it has been accepted.”
Facebook – January 30 – parse.com is now shut down – “The Parse service is now shut down. To all the developers out there, it was a pleasure helping you build apps. Goodbye and good luck!”
Node.js Foundation – January 26 – The Node.js Foundation Partners with The Linux Foundation on New Node.js Certification Program – “The Node.js Foundation, a community-led and industry-backed consortium to advance the development of the Node.js platform, today announced development of the inaugural Node.js certification program aimed to establish a baseline competency in Node.js.”
Cisco – January 25 – Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Application Performance Monitoring Leader AppDynamics – “AppDynamics’s cloud application and business monitoring platform enables the world’s largest companies to improve application and business performance. The combination of Cisco and AppDynamics will allow us to provide end to end visibility and intelligence from the network through to the application; which, combined with security and scale, and will help IT to drive a new level of business results.”
Apple – January 24 – Allow Users to Provide Ratings From Within Your App – “With iOS 10.3 developers can use a new API to ask users to provide store ratings from within the app.”
Qlik – January 24 – Qlik Sense Cloud Business Now Available for Immediate Web-based Visual Analytics – “Powered by the patented QIX Associative Indexing Engine, Qlik Sense Cloud Business provides the scalability and performance of the industry-proven Qlik visual analytics platform in a complete cloud environment.”
Intel – January 24 – ZTE Achieves Performance Breakthrough for Deep Learning with Intel FPGAs – “Intel and ZTE, a leading technology telecommunications equipment and systems company, have worked together to reach a new benchmark in deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNN). The technology is what many companies in Internet search and artificial intelligence are trying to advance, and includes picture search and matching, as one example.”
Microsoft – January 23 – Microsoft makes testing easy with open source Visual Studio Test – “Microsoft has open sourced its Visual Studio Test aka VS Test platform. The latest open source project by the software giant was originally used by its internal team to run tests in various languages. Available as a part of the .Net Core Tools in Visual Studio, VS Test is popularly used for integrated testing with Visual Studio. ”
Qt Company – January 23 – Qt v5.8 is released – “I am happy to announce that Qt 5.8 has been released today and is available for download from qt.io. Qt 5.8 does of course come with Qt Creator 4.2.1 and an update to Qt for Device Creation. Qt 5.8 is a rather large release, containing quite a large set of new functionality.”
Oracle – January 19 – Oracle acquires Apiary – “Oracle today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Apiary, whose pioneering APIFlow solution provides the framework and tools for developing application programming interfaces (APIs) that share enterprise services and data and help create modern, cloud-based applications and experiences.”
Google – January 18 – Welcoming Fabric to Google – “Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve signed an agreement to acquire Fabric to continue the great work that Twitter put into the platform. Fabric will join Google’s Developer Product Group, working with the Firebase team. Our missions align closely: help developers build better apps and grow their business.”
VoiceLabs – January 15 – The 2017 Voice Report by VoiceLabs – “In 2016, Amazon Echo evolved from novelty to in-the-home powerhouse, with over seven million devices in households. Google Home launched in November, legitimizing a multi-platform ecosystem of voice-first devices. VoiceLabs created The Voice Report to help define this emerging market, map out key pieces of the ecosystem, and highlight both the impressive growth and areas for improvement.” The VoiceLabs 36-page 2017 Voice Report highlights key analysis and predictions for voice first devices and based applications.
Visa – January 12 – Meet Visa Developer’s Community Manager Ricardo Navarro – “Meet Ricardo Navarro! He joined Visa as our new Visa Developer Community Manager. As Community Manager, he’ll be engaged in supporting and inspiring developers to become more familiar trying out the APIs connected with this new innovative platform.” This post has a Q&A with Ricardo so you get to know him better.
Google – January 6 – The Google+ API for Hangouts is no longer supported. – “We will be retiring the Google+ Hangouts API that enables developers to build apps for the older version of Hangouts video calls. New apps cannot be created but existing apps will continue to run until April 25th, 2017. We have carefully considered this change and believe that the latest updates allow us to give our users a more targeted Hangouts desktop video experience going forward.”
Sony – January 4 – Sony’s new LMX-001 display allows companies to fully customize their AR solutions – “With the LMX-001 holographic waveguide display, companies can develop customized augmented reality (AR) solutions tailored for specific use cases. The waveguide display can be integrated into a range of products such as protective eyewear, motorcycle helmets, lab glasses and any other type of solutions where the user benefits from getting real-time information directly in the field of view.”
Send me your Developer Programs News!
If you have news about your Developer Relations Program, send me an email about the news.

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
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/
by David I | Nov 11, 2016 | APIs, Developer Outreach, Developer Relations |
If your developer APIs support web services based on REST and JSON then you can reach out to just about every developer on the planet Earth (21 million of them and counting). The acronym REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer. JSON is JavaScript Object Notation. REST and JSON are the defacto standard for HTTP/HTTPS based web services APIs. RESTful Web Services are provided in just about all of the Internet based developer program APIs. REST was originally defined in Roy Thomas Fielding’s UC Irvine Doctoral Dissertation titled “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures“. Fielding is now a Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe Systems in Orange County California.

Do you use REST and JSON in your APIs?
When I do an assessment of a developer relations program one of the first things I look at are the SDKs, APIs and programming languages that are supported. Most developer programs with REST and JSON web service APIs list support for popular programming languages including Java, C#, C, C++, Python, JavaScript, Ruby and PHP. The VISA Developer Center, for example, has a “Getting Started Guide” that lets you choose to view sample source code for Java, Python, Node.Js, Ruby, C# and PHP right in place inside the guide. Developers can copy and paste the code snippets into their programs.
Besides the languages I just listed, there are many other programming languages that also support REST and JSON web services. Why would you intentionally block out developer program members that use other programming languages and frameworks? Here are some programming languages (not an exhaustive list) that have libraries that support REST and JSON based web services. I have added links to documentation, blog posts, tutorials and articles showing how to create client applications that call REST APIs.
If I have not listed your favorite programming language and the support for REST and JSON based API calls, please send me an email with the language and a URL to an article or documentation page with an example.
Reach out to Developers without having to Document your APIs for every language
If you don’t want to have to support every programming language and have examples, you can still document your Web Services REST endpoints and JSON parameters and return values and then point developers to programming language REST and JSON how to sites. I want to hear from developer program professionals that are supporting additional programming languages for your APIs.

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
by David I | Nov 9, 2016 | APIs, Developer News, Developer Programs News, Developer Relations, DevRelate |
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
SAP – November 9 – SAP Enables Fast and Efficient Development with New IoT Application Services – “SAP IoT Application Enablement provides Big Data management and services consumption without the need for managing the underlying data storage. It allows users to create an enhanced virtual representation of a product, service or process, combining sensor data, business data and contextual data.”
Google – November 9 – Introducing the Google Slides API – “we’re happy to announce that the Slides API v1 is now generally available and represents the first time that developers have ever been able to programmatically access Slides! The Slides API breaks new ground, changing the way that presentations are created.”
Facebook – November 8 – Delivering real-time AI in the palm of your hand – Lightweight and Fast, Developer Friendly. “As video becomes an even more popular way for people to communicate, we want to give everyone state-of-the art creative tools to help you express yourself.”
Blippar – November 7 – Blippar Opens up its Proprietary Tech to Democratize the Power of Augmented Reality and Computer Vision – “Providing public access to a self-service suite that includes its best-in-class augmented reality and computer vision capabilities. Alongside the release of Blippbuilder, Blippar is enabling access to its computer vision technology via the new Computer Vision API. Computer vision, a key capability Blippar uses to identify images and objects within its visual discovery browser”
DroneDeploy – November 4 – Introducing the DroneDeploy App Market – “Launching with 15 partners and unleashing the power of aerial data with integrations to Autodesk, Box, John Deere and more. Today, we’re thrilled to announce our brand new App Market, the next step in our mission to make aerial data accessible and productive.”
DreamFactory – November 3 – Tutorial: Using MQTT for IoT communication with DreamFactory and Raspberry Pi devices – “Last week we announced the DreamFactory integration of MQTT communication for IoT applications. It’s a powerful new addition to the capabilities of our robust REST API platform. For this demo we’re going to use DreamFactory as an MQTT broker for two Raspberry Pi computers acting as publisher and subscriber.”
Urban Airship – November 2 – Urban Airship Expands its Mobile Platform to Transform Customer Communications – “Urban Airship today unveiled next-generation platform services—Open Channels and Open Profiles—to deliver individualized messaging to any platform, device or marketing channel and use real-time customer data from any system. The first actualization of Urban Airship’s open channels approach is third-party support for Apple News notifications. ”
HealthTap – November 2 – HealthTap Unveils “HealthTap Cloud™ – “HealthTap Cloud™ is powered by HOPES™, the world’s first Health Operating System, which connects the entire continuum of care to each person’s unique Personal Health Record (PHR). Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Software Development Kits (SDKs) that help developers build highly personalized web, iOS, and Android apps are available with HealthTap Cloud™.”
Intel – November 2- Intel Security Outlines Strategy for Protecting New Digital Economy – “Intel Security announced an enhanced unified defense architecture designed to empower organizations to more effectively protect today’s new digital economy of trust, time and money. Through an open source strategy and the beta release of a new software development kit (SDK) for McAfee DXL, ‘white hats’ (both organizations and technology providers) will gain the ability to attach to a shared real-time communication fabric and exchange security intelligence as well as orchestrate actions for the shortest possible execution of the threat defense lifecycle.”
Wowza Media Systems – November 1 – GoCoder SDK App Challenge: Announcing the Winners! – “We’re excited to share the winners of the GoCoder SDK live mobile streaming app contest! Live streaming is becoming a part of everyday activities like shopping for clothes, watching the news, playing games, and connecting with other people, and that’s inspiring tons of new apps based on live streaming.”
VISA – November 1 – Collaboration with Open APIs – “In the fast paced world of innovation some say it is now easier than ever to become irrelevant. How do we use open APIs to stay in the game and to build the next generation of products and services for the financial services industry?”
Send me your Developer Programs News!
If you have news about your Developer Relations Program, send me an email about the news.

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