Bill Doerrfeld talks about how they help businesses make smart tech decisions by keeping an eye on emerging technologies and processes within the API space.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. « Make the world become more programmable. » That’s the goal of Nordic APIs, which holds a series of conferences and events throughout Scandinavia and, more recently, the US, to help organizations make smarter tech decisions and streamline their operations through APIs and strategies. Their work explores the API sector and sheds to light various emerging technologies and trends through their events and blogs. In this round of Cocktails, we have Nordic APIs’ editor-in-chief, who gives us an insider perspective behind their work at Nordic APIs. We also dive into the current trends within the API space, where we talk about the different API styles and specifications that have emerged, some exciting prospects and innovations from industry bodies and providers, as well as some interesting insights as to how APIs can move the industry forward. Kevin Montalbo: All right. Joining us today from Sydney, Australia is TORO Cloud CEO, and founder, David Brown. Good day, David! David Brown: Good day, Kevin! KM: Our guest for today is a well-known tech journalist who tracks the API economy, as well as covers DevOps topics, and analyzes state-of-the-art technologies in the enterprise cloud software space. He’s the Editor-in-Chief for NordicAPIs, an API event company that also runs a high-impact blog on API practice. Interviewing key players, and sharing insights through his evergreen articles, he’s been featured in several publications such as ProgrammableWeb, Tech Beacon, DevOps.com, Container Journal, CMO.com, ReadWrite, and many more. He also speaks at API conferences, online events, and podcasts, such as this one. Ladies and gentlemen, joining us today for Coding Over Cocktails is Bill Doerrfeld. Hi Bill, it’s great to have you on the show! How are you doing? Bill Doerrfeld: Hi, Kevin! Doing well. Thanks for having me. Thanks for the introduction. KM: All right, great. So, we’ll jump right into the questions, Bill. We want to talk about Nordic APIs first. So Nordic APIs was founded in 2013 and you became editor-in-chief in 2015. So, what were the founder’s objectives for Nordic APIs, and has the scope changed over the years? BD: Yeah, like you said, those founders, it was Travis Spencer and Andreas Krohn and they co-founded Nordic APIs back in 2013. A couple of years before I entered the picture there. And the mission kind of has always been to help disseminate knowledge, to help the world become more programmable through the use of APIs and API strategy. And at that time, the whole idea of becoming a platform was pretty novel. And companies were looking to this model to kind of reinvent themselves and see what sort of new businesses could be created and how you could streamline internal operations using API-first strategies. So, yeah, there was a lot of interesting knowledge at that time. And there wasn’t really an API conference series happening in the Nordic region, which is where the founders ended up. And so this was kind of built to fill that gap. And then I came across them just online and you know, being a journalist and an editor, ended up helping out with their blogs. So, I’ve been more on the content side of things for them, helping manage a lot of eBooks and blog posts and working with writers and contributors to the space to help increase knowledge around APIs. DB: So did they have a background in APIs? What drove them to set up Nordic APIs in the first place? BD: Yeah, so Travis Spencer, he’s an identity specialist and his company is now Curity and at that time, they were doing more consulting. Now they have a fully-fledged service company and Andreas is more in the API design consulting spectrum. At least that’s when he was founding or co-founding Nordic APIs. So yeah, a lot of background in that space and knowledge of what was happening at that time. DB: Curity, for those that aren’t familiar with them, do amazing work in the authentication space, particularly. BD: Yeah. They’re doing some really, really cool stuff. And I should mention their organizer and sponsor involved with Nordic API APIs. But yeah, they’re doing some innovative stuff. I think the last thing they were working on was integrating hypermedia into the hypermedia-driven security for an API design around authentication, which is interesting. DB: Yeah. They’re always pushing the boundaries. So, Nordic APIs covers a very broad range of API-related topics from specifications, standards, security, and architecture. Were you already familiar with these topics when you joined Nordic APIs or did you have to learn real fast? BD: I was already somewhat familiar. My first, kind of eye-opening moment was when I was trying to design an app and it totally failed. We did this Kickstarter and everything. It was a part of a college course, which I took really seriously and brought it off-campus with some people and we tried to make it happen, but it didn’t end up working. But one of the co-founders, Andy, he was, like, « Oh, well, how about we just use the Venmo API to solve this payments issue? » And I was like, what the hell is that? And you look it up, you see things like « active pharmaceutical ingredients », all of these acronyms that have nothing to do with application programming interface. And then a few months later, I ended up doing a lot of work with ProgrammableWeb and just researching a lot of APIs and cataloging a lot for their directory, which really turned me on to the whole industry. And I just realized how fascinating this was. That they’re, you know, creating all this reusable technology and literally helping people not reinvent the wheel from all these different business operations that you could just plug and play into your own application. That really seemed like where things were heading and I wanted to be a part of it. So, that’s kind of how I got started. And so before I got into Nordic API’s editor-in-chief thing, I had a basic baseline understanding. But really, I had to keep asking questions and I think that’s what drove things forward. Like realizing what I personally didn’t understand about the space really helped me realize what other newcomers wouldn’t readily understand as well. And so actually, just assigned those kinds of questions to our writers, you know, like, « What is OAuth? », « What is rate-limiting? », « What does versioning mean? », « What are the REST constraints? » So, just realizing what I personally didn’t understand and I was able to build that knowledge, And I actually recommend that to anyone who’s in charge of any sort of blog presence or thought leadership channel. Recognizing what you don’t know and owning up to it and being proud of that can be a strategy to avoid imposter syndrome and realize what you need to improve on. So we’re always trying to improve our knowledge of the space and yeah, I’m proud of the body of work we’ve assembled. But I really owe it to the good founding direction and awesome contributors and writers. DB: So, whilst you have a broad range of subjects related to APIs, then a little bit further in the field like microservices architecture and the like, but ultimately, you’re covering APIs, you’ve been doing it for six years. Do you find it hard to keep finding new things to write about? BD: You would think that you would, right? DB: Yeah. BD: I’ve been surprised how easy it is to keep ongoing. You crack open an onion and then you peel back the layers and then you realize there’s like a hundred more onions in that onion. So, it’s kind of like, the deeper you go down the rabbit hole, the weirder it gets and the more questions you have. And even if you did learn everything, it would be null and void a few months later, just with how fast the technological space progresses. Everyone’s always evolving. I know some of your questions are about new trends and standards, which I’m sure we’ll cover. So, yeah, I think that’s part of it. Also, there’s like so many great minds trying to solve these problems that we’re experiencing with things like linting OpenAPI specifications. Well, that’s a very nuanced concept and only relevant, [from] 2016 onwards. So, there’s so many new packages being developed and then those need to be put to the test, or we’re doing roundups of like a bunch of different comparable comparative technologies. So yeah, there’s a lot to cover. DB: Interesting. Let’s discuss how the industry has changed. So, over the last six years, you would have seen a lot of evolution in the space. How have you seen, I’m guessing you’ve seen specifications change, new standards emerge, what’s the sort of things you’ve experienced over those six years? BD: I’d say the most significant change I’ve noticed is the emphasis on developer experience. And when I first entered this space, this was a very novel concept that not many people were acknowledging or thinking about really. So, you would kind of just publish an API documentation to some sort of web portal. People weren’t even really calling it developer portals at that time. And the standards were different. The design looked a lot different not only visually, but they were using SOAP and XML and kind of holdovers from SOA days, which was before my time. I can’t even talk about it fluently, which shows the evolution of the space here. And doing some of that work with ProgrammableWeb, just reviewing all these documentations and realizing how difficult it was for someone coming from a more business perspective, just to understand what the tech was doing. But nowadays interfaces are a lot prettier. There’s more testing sandboxes. There’s better use of the sleek dark mode-filled developer experiences for these APIs.
