Open Tech Calendar

August session will be split into 2 talks, "APIs on the Scale of Decades" by Gary Fleming and "Performance in the Javascript Era" with Benjamin Howarth.

"APIs are hard. They are pretty much ship now, regret later." -- Chet Haase.

What do Greek philosophy, early video games, and Japanese bullet trains tell us about how we should design our APIs?

Writing any old API is easy. Writing an API that can evolve to meet your needs over the coming months, years, and even decades; now that's hard. We'll look at some common practices and try to see where they go wrong, some misunderstood techniques and how to use them better, and some less common practices that might be useful.

Let me give you some good advice that'll help you evolve your APIs, and some big ideas that might provoke some interesting thoughts.

Bio:
Gary is an agile provocateur, software nomad, and lean mercenary. His main hobby is to try and help companies to build better software in better ways. Sometimes this is by helping them with the messy human communication side of agile, and sometimes it's through teaching better software crafting practices - but it's usually at least some of each. Coaching, mentoring, writing, and showing; whatever helps in the context. You'll find him at various local meetups trying to both share what he knows and learn from his peers.

Performance in the Javascript Era
More than just tips, tricks, metrics and clicks, from code to cloud and back again - performance on the web has gone way beyond "oh just put your CSS in the header and your Javascript in the footer".

More often approached as an afterthought, this primer will cover some essential ground on how to approach measuring website and web app performance, along with some quick wins, through to some more lower-level technical nuances with HTTP2, compression, and header management, and finally putting all our tools together to comprehensively and continuously keep a watchful eye on your performance metrics.

Topic will include ASP.NET and NodeJS samples, and slides & code will be made available on Github well in advance.

Benjamin Howarth is a freelance ASP.NET architect & senior developer, specialising in open-source content management systems. His experience in high-scale high-performance websites has been a strength over the past 5 years, working for Tesco, FIA Formula E, Universal Music Group, and Manchester Airport Group. He can be found @benjaminhowarth on Twitter.