Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: APIs

My Live Blog of the 10th Annual Defrag Conference…

November 15, 2016 / / 2 Comments

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Once again, I live-blogged the Defrag Conference in Denver. This is the tenth year of this great annual tech event, and I’ve attended them all. The original idea was to get together to defrag our brains and stop to think about where technology is headed — what’s coming next. I’ve met and interviewed so many great people at this event over the years: Brad Feld, Seth Levine, Fred Wilson, David Cohen, T.A. McCann, and tons of other tech leaders, investors, authors, and more.  Not to speak of many fellow tech observers, analysts, writers, bloggers, PR people, and notable geeks who’ve come to be frequent collaborators and friends. I’ve also connected with old buddies, like the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and shared some huge laughs. Attending this conference is almost like going to camp each year. I just wouldn’t miss it! (Especially when I was one of only three guys who had perfect 10-year attendance records.) Eric and Kim Norlin and their team do such a great job putting on Defrag.

So, what was on tap for discussion at the 10th annual? Lots of topics: AWS Lambda, microservices, blockchain, APIs, machine learning, AI, insights about developer marketing, bare-metal cloud, and other geeky stuff — presented by an impressive band of speakers… founders, CTOs, rock-star developers, tech evangelists, and other crazy folks. Always a fun event. And what you don’t learn in the big room, well, you can learn in the Tap Room each night till the wee hours. (Oh, and we talk a lot about sports, too!)

I posted my play-by-play updates from Wednesday morning November 16 through Thursday afternoon November 17, 2016 — live, in real-time from the Omni Interlocken Resort, in beautiful (warm and sunny!) Colorado… well, until it snowed in the final hours.

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NOTE: Unfortunately, updates to WordPress software since I originally published this post caused the live blog plugin to break. I got no warning. Nice going, WordPress! So, my content appears to be lost forever… 🙁  

I guess you just had to be there! Trust me, it was good.

My Coverage of #Gluecon 2014: Seven API-Related Stories Written for ProgrammableWeb

May 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Glue-stageI attended the Glue Conference May 21-22 in Broomfield, CO, and a pre-event on May 20 called API Strategy & Practice. It was my sixth Glue in a row, since the event began in 2009. It's been a very popular developer event, and has grown each year — now attracting approximately 650 attendees. There were 70 speakers, selected from some 500 who applied. I've written extensively about each of the six Glue Conferences I've attended. This year, I reported for ProgrammableWeb for the first time. (More about that site below.)

Here are my seven posts from #Gluecon 2014, in chronological order of the particular sessions that I wrote about:

• Developers at Roundtable Ask, ‘Are APIs Copyrightable?’ (863 words)

• ‘API First’ Isn’t Just for Startups Anymore (529 words)

• How to Secure Your REST API the Right Way (411 words)

• 10 Reasons Why Developers Hate Your API (918 words)

• Reverb, Apigee Announce Swagger 2.0 Workgroup (720 words)

• As APIs Proliferate, Can Search Scale to Keep Up? (388 words)

• API Design Should Be About ‘Interactive’ and ‘Tinkering’ (600 words)

I also shot a bunch of photos at the event, as I always do. Here's my Flickr set of Gluecon 2014.

About ProgrammableWeb:  As the world's leading source of news and information about Internet-based application programming interfaces (APIs), ProgrammableWeb is known as the Web's defacto journal of the ProgrammableWeb-logo API economy. Since it was founded in 2005, ProgrammableWeb (now based in San Francisco) has been chronicling the daily evolution of the global API economy while amassing the Web's most relied-on directory when it comes to discovering and searching for APIs to use in Web and mobile applications. In 2014, Gartner identified ProgrammableWeb as one of several “Cool Vendors” in Information Innovation. It is also the most widely-cited source of data related to APIs in the mainstream media, conferences, whitepapers, and other forms of research. ProgrammableWeb is where you can keep-up with what's new and interesting in a world where the Web is a programmable platform. When it says "the Web is a platform," it is referring to how Web-based and mobile apps are enabled by Internet-based APIs. For example, the way in which the developers of many location-aware apps are able to incorporate Google Maps into their wares with just a few lines of code (using the Google Maps API). Read more about ProgrammableWeb here.

Gluecon 2014: StrongLoop Adds Offline Synch for Mobile Apps to Its LoopBack API Framework

May 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

At the Glue Conference May 21-22 in Broomfield, CO, StrongLoop announced it is greatly simplifying data synch and replication for mobile apps requiring APIs and connectivity to enterprise data sources. StrongLoop-logoThe company's LoopBack open-source API framework, written in Node.js, is used to connect devices to enterprise data sources. This new functionality is available for Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL and more.

Almost all enterprise mobile apps that are data-driven require offline sync capabilities. Until now, developers first had to figure out how to locally store a subset of the application's data. Secondly, they had to implement a mechanism that could keep the data synchronized on both the client and server.  For the first time, developers can now easily synchronize to and from various databases without requiring constant network connectivity. LoopBack's replication also handles the complexity of moving data between devices, device to server, and server to server. This upgrade to LoopBack means developers can now focus on the front end versus the mechanics of how to replicate data between disparate databases, whether they be in the cloud or the data center.

I interviewed Al Tsang, CTO of StrongLoop, after he gave his talk at Gluecon, which was entitled, "Isomorphic JavaScript in Action: Using HTML5, Node.js, and LoopBack for Offline Synch." (Apologies for accidentally clipping off his last sentence. The company was founded in 2013, is based in San Mateo CA, and is backed by investors including Ignition Partners and Shasta Ventures. It is the leading contributor to the latest Node.js v0.12 release. Also apologies for the sound quality. Forgot my good mic!)

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