How and Why To Dogfood Your API – ProgrammableWeb APIConUK 2014

Last month I was invited to speak at ProgrammableWeb’s APIConUK conference in London to share practices from our experience at Kaltura around building scalable, sustainable and future-proof APIs in a talk dubbed “How and Why To Dogfood Your API“. As the name of the talk suggests, the core concept I was discussing is building platforms with API-first approach rather than the more common “API as a Product” approach.

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Talk description:

While a great many API enthusiasts will tell you that achieving API utopia means re-architecting all of your applications (Web, mobile, or otherwise) on top of the same APIs that you make available to external developers, very few organizations have actually succeeded at doing what’s necessary; turning their infrastructures inside out. Many organizations can’t envision having the time, patience, or resources to fly a plane while the wings are being ripped-off and reinstalled. But open source video platform provider Kaltura pulled it off. As a result, Kaltura’s core infrastructure — back end servers, core applications, etc. — rely on the same APIs that front-facing partners’ applications rely on. The result was a highly flexible future-proof platform that enables customers, partners, developers and startups to rapidly extend the platform with innovative implementations that continuously push the limits of what Kaltura can do. In this presentation, Kaltura willl cover the principles of what makes a great, dogfoodable API, how to make it resilient, future-proof and yet backward compatible, and most importantly how to enable and support customers and partners looking to extend an API platform.