Thank You Chicago For Making APIStrat A Success

We wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who made @APIStrat Chicago such a success. Thank you to our sponsors, speakers, and to the 3Scale API Infrastructure team. Without all of these people working together, the open conversation about the API space, that is @APIStrat would never happen.

We kicked Wednesday off with workshop introducing APIs, helping attendees understand the best tactics for building successful APIs, managing those APIs, and how to test and manage integrations using SoapUI Pro. There was also a workshop dedicated to understanding how the City of Chicago has put APIs to work, and how citizens across the US can help make change using open data and APIs.

Thursday morning the official event kicked off and we heard from Julia Ferraioli (@juliaferraioli), of Google about developer needs, the challenges Andrew Nacin (@nacin) of WordPress faces in deploying APIs, and the inspiring API efforts by Joshua Greenough (@Bankons), Senior Director of Innovation at Capital One Labs. Sessions on the first day covered API design, use in the media industry, architecture, data APIs, internal APIs, and the fast moving Internet of Things. Toward the end of the day we were woken up by the hilarious Traffic and Weather LIVE. With John Sheehan & Steve Marx, the forward thinking view of Phil Windley (@windley) at Kynetx, and the wisdom of John Musser (@johnmusser) from API Science, wrapping things up with a discussion on Building The Next Generation API Stack.

Friday we opened up hearing the vision of John Ellis of Ford, and the mobile vision of Tim McCauley from Walgreens, and learned more about the critical analytics layer that is emerging, driven by APIs, from Kyle Wild (@dorkitude) of Keen IO. After talking APIs, Data and Adaptive Intelligence on main stage we moved into sessions and talked marking, civic, testing, and APIs in the enterprise before heading back to the MainStage to listen to Pratap Ranade (@PratapRanade) at Kimonolabs talk about unlocking your organization's hidden potential for innovation. We closed up the day talking with Neill Occhiogrosso (@costanoavc) of Costanoa Venture Capital, and Noah Doyle (@noahventure) from Javelin Venture Partners about investment in the API space, and then closed the week up with an extremely relevant panel discussion about the Politics of APIs.

In short, there was a lot of content covered at @APIStrat, crammed into just a short three days. You can find all the slides, videos, and photos from the event, all published online. We are already planning the next edition of APIStrat, which will be in Berlin in Spring 2015. We are also still looking for input on where @APIStrat should go for the fall of 2015. We look forward to continuing these conversations online, in Berlin in the spring, and thank you all for being part of the APIStrat community.