Paul Gebheim on how to just get your mobile app out there

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Paul Gebheim on how to just get your mobile app out there

​​API Economist: Congratulations on getting your new app launched, Beer Hunt. I see that it’s on the Apple App Store. Walk me through the Monkey Inferno creative process for the app.

Paul Gebheim: Basically, we are all old web developers. In order to help us think for mobile, our iPhone guy said, "I'm going to teach a class and show you all how to program iPhone apps." We all were like, "Sweet, it's going to be awesome," but we had to come up with ideas for what to make. One of the ideas that our sysadmin, Jesse House, came up with was about an app that lets you put pins on a map wherever you drink a beer. The more you drink beer, the faster you fill up the map. In two days, one of our architects, Michael, went from knowing nothing about how to make an iPhone app to creating the original app called, "Beer Map," now renamed, "Beer Hunt."

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John Sheehan on API design for humans

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John Sheehan on API design for humans

API Economist: Your article, APIs are Dead, Long Live APIs, created a little bit of a stir. What point were you trying to drive?

John Sheehan: I think it created a stir because people don't want to think that something so new could be “dead.” I was hoping to make the point that they're far from it; that the amount of attention that the consumer APIs out there get is disproportionate to the amount of total API traffic they handle.

I spend a lot of time talking with people, finding out where they actually use APIs, where they apply it most. The two things I hear most common are, "Yeah, we might use a social API here and there," or "Yeah, we might use an infrastructure API like Stripe, SendGrid, Twilio, or Parse" but the vast majority of our traffic is powering our mobile apps or internal to our company and never exposed externally. That's where most of the uptake has really happened in the last year.

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Jeff Barr on Amazon's transformation to an API platform empowering cloud computing

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Jeff Barr on Amazon's transformation to an API platform empowering cloud computing

API Economist: There’s been a lot said on Jeff Bezos’ big mandate issued back in 2002. If I understand it correctly, it basically stated that all your teams internally would be required to expose their data and their functionality through APIs. How has this mandate impacted the growth and innovation you've seen in AWS?

Jeff Barr: The effort is very, very real. It has been for quite a while. From where I stand, it seems like a really strong, positive impact. I think back to before I joined Amazon and I was a guest at a little developer conference that we were holding. It was just me and three or four outside developers that were brought in to get a sneak preview of what Amazon was thinking in the web services world. This was around the spring of 2002.

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Gray Brooks on the U.S. government and the GSA Open Data Intiative

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Gray Brooks on the U.S. government and the GSA Open Data Intiative

API Economist: Back in May 2012, the White House launched their Digital Strategy: Building A 21st Century Platform To Better Serve The American People. One of the key tenets of that strategy was to make open data content and web APIs the foundation of the platform. How is the GSA doing on implementing this strategy, and what are some of the biggest challenges you face?

Gray Brooks: Along with all the other agencies actually implementing the Digital Strategy, GSA reports on its progress at GSA.gov/DigitalStrategy. There's also a JSON and XML version available at /DigitalStrategy.json and /DigitalStrategy.xml. We use those because we want to have the progress that agencies are making per‑item and per‑subsection parsed out very clearly, so that information is available not only to the OMB and the White House, but also to everyone else.

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Kin Lane on spreading his API evangelism to the community and the government

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Kin Lane on spreading his API evangelism to the community and the government

API Economist: How did you become the API Evangelist?

Kin Lane: I was the VP of Technology at an events management company, WebEvents Global, leading their technology and architecture. I ran all SAP events, including Sapphire for two years. I was also involved with TechEd and a lot of the North American events. I was brought on to move them out of the data center and be more elastic in the cloud, and meet the demands of the global events. I moved it into the Amazon Cloud and re-architected the whole system using APIs and Amazon APIs. I loved APIs. But I wanted to do something else. I started studying the API space. I quickly realized that there are a lot of technical pundits in this space. But no one was keeping eye on the business of APIs, the myriad of tools it takes to be successful, nor approaches to evangelism and marketing to developers and the whole politics of APIs. So I launched API Evangelist and just started studying this space. Three years later I'm still doing it.

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