Mashery Developer Blog

Change is always (almost) always good. As much as I love hackathons, it’s always nice to break away once in a while and do something different. Being at php|tek (#tek12) in Chicago last week was one such opportunity.

Held at Sheraton Suites over the course of 4 days, php|tek is a PHP conference that brings together great technology content in form of high-quality presentations by some of the brightest experts in the PHP world.

API Development Workshop and API Security Talk

Rob Richards, Mashery’s Chief Architect gave one of the most comprehensive 3-hour workshops I’ve ever seen on everything API. Starting right from why you should have an API to how you should be exposing these APIs, different data formats, versioning, debugging when things go wrong and then topping it off with some real world API usage examples with demos of I/O Docs and mobile HTML5 development tool appMobi featuring Mashery code samples from Neustar IP Intelligence (formerly known as Quova).

His deck - Building APIs

“I don’t trust anyone. I don’t even trust myself” ~ Rob Richards

But, wait it didn’t end there. He followed that talk couple days later with yet another classic - API Security. The mantra - trust no one and expect that your API will be attacked. He talked about authentication, authorization, privacy, as well as payload and other API related attacks and security vulnerabilities. Again, a really useful talk if you have an API or are planning to design one.

His deck - API Security

Building APIs talk

The Mashery engineering team was represented in full force with Jeff Moore & Brian Fenton jumping in at the unconference and presenting an hour-long talk on Building APIs. Very well received. The hangman game built on top of I/O Docs was indeed a nice touch! :)

TinTin loves APIs

In this 20-min informal unconference talk, I told the story of how TinTin discovered the power of APIs through I/O Docs. How he used it to find friends he could share his new apartment in New York with using Whit.li’s compatibility API and then found out the reviews of his movie “Adventures of TinTin using Rotten Tomatoes API. Then demo’d a few quick hacks built using some of Mashery’s customer APIs.

It’s all about the badges

One thing I really loved about php|tek was their whole take on gamifying the conference by giving out achievement patches. You earn these patches by doing things like asking questions, networking, partying, and joining one of many activities. Also, you may think that they are one of those regular virtual badges you see across the internet now. No sir. These are really physical “you can touch” badges made from the finest embroidered materials and backed by Velcro for easy application to a variety of surfaces. Brilliant concept, I thought. You could see people really vying to earn these badges, including couple of Mashery badges. Gamification - Sheer genius move!

The part that I loved the most about php|tek was it’s friendly and welcoming community of attendees and speakers. It was really all about people. The fact that most of the speakers and attendees were staying at the same hotel in which the conference was being held meant it provided plenty of networking opportunities even after the conference had ended for the day.

Mashery has been an active supporter of php|tek for a few years now, and have hired some of our engineers out of this event. This time was no different. It was great to see the kind of support that Mashery as a company enjoys in this community. Take a bow Keith Casey, Cal Evans & team for putting up a fantastic event. We can’t wait to go back!

There are hackathons and then there are TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathons. The semi-annual 24-hour Hackday was held last weekend in New York City in the heart of midtown Manhattan at Pier 94, overlooking the Hudson river. Over 300 hackers attended the event and it was an absolute blast.

Having heard so much about them in the past, I was really excited about getting a chance to not only represent Mashery customer APIs at the hackathon, but also getting my hands dirty with some good ole’ hacking. The fact that we were a team of six people representing Mashery made it even more fun and exciting.

What made it different?

What made TC Disrupt stand out from others was the incredible number of hacks that developers produced. 92 hacks were produced in less than 24 hours. Also, the dedication of the hackers has to be commended. I’ve done my share of hackathons, so I speak with a bit of experience here. You usually see the crowd thin out a bit after dinner. Not here. No sir. The sheer number of people who stood back all night - coding away was very impressive. They just kept hacking all night. The energy was amazing even in the wee hours of the morning. 

Get, set, go

It all began at about 2pm on Saturday afternoon, with the doors being opened to the New York hackers. Pier 94 probably had the perfect setup for a mega hackathon like this. Big warehouse kinda space. Plenty of roundtables, each of which could seat about 8-10 people. Heavy duty power chords hanging off the roof at each table, to make sure every table had enough juice to power the hacking. Not to mention, stable WiFi (for the most part anyway).

Workshops

Prior to the hacking, several API Workshops were held from 3-6pm to expose developers to exciting APIs, tools and frameworks that could be used at the hackathon. I got a chance to talk about I/O Docs and demo some of the APIs from the Mashery API Network - including Rovi, USA TODAY and Whit.li, all of whom had sent a team of developers to compete at the hackathon. What better way represent than to have a team of enthusiastic developers onsite coding? With the workshops out of the way, the hacking officially began at 6pm and ended at 11am on Sunday morning.

Bryan from Whit.li

Rahim from Rovi Cloud Services

Chris from USA TODAY

Mashery USB drive

We also handed out our famous Mashery USB drives that double up as beer bottle openers, preloaded with hack helpers like code libraries and API docs. Needless to say, they were a major hit.

Best Mashery Hack Winner: Sidewinder

The best app built using Mashery API Network was Sidewinder - An iPad companion app that allows you to read stuff on your desktop and pulls up relevant information around that content on your iPad - real time, thereby allowing you to use your iPad as a sidebar. So, reading a TechCrunch article on your desktop browser would pull useful info like the author’s twitter handle, klout score, related articles etc on the iPad. Pretty nifty. It ended up winning our first ever Mashery Red BIG Jambox!

Team Oh My Klout

Another app built using Mashery’s API network was “Oh my klout” - an asteroids game built by Haris Amin (incidentally the winner of API Hackday NYC earlier this year) using the Klout API. Shoot the avatars of people with low Klout scores as they move around violently. Really well done.

DEMO VIDEO: Oh, my Klout

Team Kover

The talented teams from USA TODAY and Whit.li joined hands to build a kick-ass app together - an iPad app that lets you discover the books your friends are reading based on your preferences and compatibility with them, cleverly using Whit.li’s compatibility API and also the USA TODAY Book Reviews API. Definitely an app I’d be using as soon as it hits the store!

DEMO VIDEO: Kover

Team AlfredFlik

Rahul and I from Mashery chipped in together to build a quick hack for Alfred App. We built an extension for Alfred that lets you provide a movie name and then queries Rovi Cloud Services to find similar movies, find the reviews for the movie using Rotten Tomatoes API and then sends the result as a text using Twilio. Got its share of appreciation and we ended up bagging the award for best app built using any of the Rovi APIs!

DEMO VIDEO: AlfredFlik

Team Mashery

I have represented Mashery at several hackathons ever since I joined, but this one was special. This was the first time, I was joined by my awesome NY & SF Masherites on site. It was a full-house! In fact, Team Mashery camped out on site all night. No Sleep. Helping developers. On caffeine. Cracking code. All night.

Winners!

#1: Thingscription - A service that tracks user impressions to figure out what products to offer as a recurring subscription to customers.

#2: Poachbase - A recruiting service that uses Crunchbase data to determine which startups may soon fold, and who’s worth swiping away from them.

#3: Practikhan - A platform that lets teachers create their own online quizzes to share with their students

You can read more about the winners here

We were all obviously sleep deprived and dead tired by the end of it all, but it was all worth it. It was an amazing experience. Definitely worth repeating.

Photo Credits: Rahul Gilani, Sasha Kamenetska

As a matter of practice at Mashery, we regularly poll developers about their pain points in order to learn which resources help best address the points they identify. We advise clients to make it a habit to actively listen to developers — both inside and outside their company — if they want to design an API that developers will use. Listening can take the form of monitoring Twitter, Quora, and Stack Overflow, setting the right Google alerts, but if you prioritize correctly, you should also schedule opportunities to listen to developers in person.

Mashery did just that this year at SXSW. We surveyed 188 web and mobile application developers (out of 1002 total SXSW attendees surveyed) using our iPad survey and friendly Mashery team at our API demo lounge. The developer survey results reveal some interesting API findings we think are worth sharing. Developers were asked to rank several hot issues in their world. What did we find? The developer mindset is evolving to be more focused on opportunities to monetize, work efficiently and stay abreast of new developments in application development. A compiled list of the top insights from their 2012 kudos and criticisms is below.

1. Commercial Terms of Service overtake Code Samples as #1 pain point:
Listen up, Bing, Yahoo! and NPR — if you want to attract a thriving, vibrant developer ecosystem to extend your data in new and interesting ways, providing some form of easy to understand, non-legalese, commercial terms of use for your API is a great spark. A non-commercial TOS can be a signal of data “stinginess” instead of partnership and market opportunity. In a change from how developers answered this question in 2010, developers reordered their priorities. This year’s survey revealed 33 percent of developers prioritized APIs having commercial terms of service over APIs having working code samples, documentation or API Explorer tools. In contrast, our 2010 developer survey results, showed an equal proportion of developers rating code samples as their top priority. As the rationale for a business or organization to offer an API continues to evolve, ask yourself the question any developer would: why would I waste my valuable time integrating with an API if can never monetize my app using that data?

In addition, The Guardian and USA TODAY — who perhaps not coincidentally are talking to app developers at a lot of tech events and hackathons this year — are examples of 2 traditional newspaper APIs that have bucked the trend in their industry and offer commercial TOS for at least some of their APIs. They also both have the developer adoption and quality device coverage to show for it.

2. Code samples remain a significant priority for developers. Developers don’t want to re-invent the wheel. Nearly as important as the opportunity to make money, giving developers a working code sample to re-use and iterate on remains a top priority. This priority fell from 33 percent to 22.5 percent since 2010. Potential causes for this include the advancement of interactive documentation such as Mashery’s I/O Docs, and the increasing use of APIs not just to build apps, but also to leverage standard pieces of code where re-writing the same function over and over. There is no secret sauce in commodity code snippets that do not actually advance one’s standing amongst the other apps on the market. When possible, re-usable code FTW!

3. Is API documentation actually getting better? It’s arguable that the state of API documentation is a better one than the last time we asked this question in 2010. Thanks to companies like Twilio, Stripe, Wordnik, Klout, and Posterous, we think the state of API documentation is getting better. Developers seem to agree. We hope that our open sourced I/O Docs available on Github has helped API providers offer better, more maintainable and accurate documentation. 22% of developers feel that well-maintained API documentation is their top ask of API providers.

4. API Explorer is trending higher as APIs multiply. Allowing developers to make live test calls is a trend we are seeing on more and more well-adopted API portals. It’s still an emerging feature across the full landscape of APIs, and less ubiquitous than code samples, docs and TOS. Still, 16 percent of developers we surveyed feel that getting hands on with an API quickly is a significant challenge for them. Mashery clients have data to back up that having an API Explorer in your Getting Started area accelerates developer onboarding for their API.

As the sheer number of public APIs continues to grow faster and faster, the possibilities for building integrations and applications with API data grows as well. Prioritizing the developer tools and resources that help simplify understanding the market opportunity, ease of use, and unique data your API has to offer makes your API more attractive to developers who have to filter through an increasing amount of APIs just to get at the “good stuff.” Above all, make sure to actively listen to developers about the perceived value of your API. This one single act will have a positive reverberations on your brand, your recruiting efforts, your product development, and your ability to react to upcoming disruptive innovation in your industry.

(Source: blog.mashery.com)

Scanning through my news feeds before getting ready for php|tek this year, I found this article about favoring protocols over APIs and it raises some good points about API design and interoperability. The main focus of the article is that an API is really an agreed-upon combination of a protocol and an endpoint, and that if more standardized protocols are developed and used, changing endpoints becomes trivial.

As an example, take XMPP. There are thousands of messaging services that are built on top of the XMPP protocol, from well-known public services like Google Talk to private internal chat services run on company intranets. Because the protocol is standardized, there are also many different clients that support the protocol. Because the services all speak XMPP, the clients can interact with any of those services by changing their endpoints.

All of the players in that interaction gain value by using the protocol. The clients get a bigger audience since they can connect to more services, and the endpoint providers get to rely on standard libraries for building and documenting their service, so there service code can be moreDRY.

It’s not just simple messaging protocols that can benefit from this idea. Any industry or business case has the potential for a standard protocol. For example, the OpenTravel spec allows for transfer of flight information, hotel reservations, car rentals, and several other pieces of travel-related information in a standardized way. There are many other standard protocols too, for example weather data or news. The more companies that adopt a specification, the less friction there is transferring data in that industry. Imagine how much easier it would be to build a news aggregator app if you could connect to 20+ news outlets and parse all of the responses exactly the same way.

If you’re building an API, consider implementing a standardized protocol if one already exists in your business space. If you’re consuming an API that is not built upon a standard protocol, see if the API provider is willing to work with an existing standard, or propose their own.

If you’d like to talk about this or other API geekery, come see us at php|tek in Chicago this week. We’ll be mingling around in different sessions or hanging out at the Mashery booth. Look for us at the unconference too!

Pete Erickson and his team at MoDev have a knack of making developers of all experience levels feel welcome.

Last week, the MoDevDC team got mobile developers and UI/UX designers from the local DC Metro area together for MoDevUX hackathon at LivingSocial’s digs in Washington DC.

Having lived in the DC area for close to a decade, I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm and the quality of hackers. Not long ago, DC was struggling to get the Startup culture going. This has changed dramatically in the last year or two, with the likes of LivingSocial, Taxi Magic, CustomInk, Audax Health operating out of the DC Metro area. A termendous turnout at a hackathon like this only validates the booming startup community. And looking at the hacks produced, only fair to say - DC’s got talent!

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The Hacks

It was a fantastic turnout. About 80 hackers showed up on a beautiful Saturday morning at LivingSocial’s HQ in downtown Washington DC. 21 hacks were produced in little under 9 hours. All of them, really good quality.

Mashery Hacks

As many as 7 hacks were built using Mashery’s API Network

• That’s my jam: Uses Rdio’s API to request songs using your mobile device. Really really cool! Think parties. Think DJ.
• WeatherRoute: Uses WeatherBug API to figure out the hourly weather while driving between two places. Pretty cool & useful.
• YourHealth: A mobile app that lets you track your health. Also provides health articles using USA TODAY’s Health Articles API. Really nicely done.
• Tap the person with most Klout: A cool game that uses Klout’s API to guess who’s more awesome.
• Add2Q: An iPhone app that lets you take a picture of a DVD UPC & add it to your Netflix DVD queue.
• Welcome Aliens: An app built to help the most under-served market in the galaxy. Uses USA TODAY’s Census API to help Aliens find the most populous destinations - you know to give them most bang for their buck!
• Event Masher:An app that lets people find events based on interests. Uses Weather Bug API to provide weather info around those events.

Complete list of hacks. (Thanks to Hacker League)

The Winners

Grand prize + Best hack built using Mashery’s APIs - “That’s my jam”. Awesome music queuing app powered by Rdio

Best Designed app - After Party. Built by solo developer - Theo, who incidentally was part of the winning team at BeMyApp NYC hackathon back in Feb.

Best App built using Blackberry - Tommy & Sean. The son-father winning duo from November MoDevHack was back at their hacking best and ended up winning the Best App built using Blackberry for their app ShuttleWatch - that lets you share and watch the videos of NASA’s Space Shuttle on a map.

Great space at LivingSocial

Huge shout out to Living Social for opening up their spaces and being such a gracious host. They have a kickass space and a really great set of people.

More pics here

The MoDevUX conference

The hackathon was preceeded by a day long UX conference at Tysons Corner, VA. There were many good talks, but the one talk that stood out for me was - Seven Deadly Mobile Myths by Josh Clark. Brilliant stuff. More about him here

Some other interesting tidbits from the conference -

• Bad UX is an experience that ends up maing the user feel stupid through no fault of his own.
• Good UX is an experience that ends up making the user feel smarter (that ne actually is)
• UI != UX
• Facts like - Took AOL 9 years to get to a million subscribers. Facebook - 9 months. DrawSomething - 9 days! Mobile growth is steeper than ever.
• And the killer - It’s not “mobile” first. It’s content & APIs first.

Hackathons are growing not only in number but also in scale. The Mobile App Olympics is a global event that took place in San Francisco, New York, Dallas, Berlin, Zurich, Paris and London. Hundreds of developers worldwide worked tirelessly to build mobile apps from scratch, competing for sponsor prizes and to be crowned the best app overall.

Mashery developer evangelist teams were present at both NYC and London, and I was covering the latter. Innovation Warehouse, the coworking/incubator space in London, played host to throngs of coders and designers for two days. I helped mentor teams with their apps and API integrations. The participants hailed from all over greater London, but several flew in from other countries, including Spain and Sweden.

The event format was quite similar to that of Startup Weekend, where ideas were pitched and then voted upon to determine which apps would be built. On the opening Friday evening we had over 120 attendees and 31 ideas. Ten out of the 31 ideas were elected to move forward, and two additional people that could not be dissuaded by lack of votes, convinced the collective that their ideas were worthy to move on. Participants were then invited to get up in front of everyone, talk about their skills and interests, so they could match up with the best teams.

The Guardian Open Platform API caught a lot of attention from the developers. Teams were diving into vertical news and editorial content with search filters for apps ranging from dietary needs to entertainment. For example, uMotif, one of the runners up of the competition, used the Guardian API to find healthy lunch and dinner recipes for their health and well-being app. Another app, titled Neusic (http://bit.ly/neusic on your mobile device), analyzed the mood and sentiment of news articles on the Guardian, found music that matched the mood and played them while you read on your mobile device. Neusic was built using jqMobi, the open source Javascript framework by appMobi.

Another app, called twittgift (video of their demo and their award acceptance) made relevant gift recommendations for your Twitter friends, powered by the Gifts.com API. twittgift was a native Android app that delivered an incredibly polished experience. You simply authorized your Twitter account, chose a price range, and received instant gift recommendations for the people you follow on Twitter. twittgift was selected as the winner of the Mashery prize (best use of a Mashery network API), taking home a treasure trove of hackathon loot — including a Jawbone Jambox bluetooth speaker, magic RESTful coffee mugs, RESTful eye masks, and the beloved 1GB USB bottle opener.

Big thanks to Olga from TechMeetups, Innovation Warehouse, and fellow sponsors CloudBees and SkillsMatter. London tech represented well in the hackathon, and were lovely hosts during the post-event pub festivities. And congratulations to all of the developers and designers who came together to make BeMyApp UK a success by any measure. Cheers!

Couple weeks ago, I got a taste of my first Barcamp in Boston along with Boston Masherite Vic Mahillon. It was a refreshing change and a great experience. Two full days of sharing and learning in an informal yet effective format.

What is a Barcamp - you ask?

A BarCamp is a participatory “un-conference” event, where the attendees are in charge of what happens. It’s free and open to anyone. Anyone can host or participate in discussions, demo your projects, and meet other techie, geeky people. People interested in teaching and learning in an open environment come together to share their knowledge and experience.

The glass wall of ideas and workshops.

What I loved most about BarCamp Boston was the intense desire of people (most of them students) to share and learn in an open environment. The glass wall was open to anyone interested in sharing or talking about a topic of interest. The result - two days of non-stop workshops ranging from - UI/UX, APIs, Node.js, building mobile apps to topics as diverse as Building company culture. It had it all.

Complete list of sessions/workshops

The Mashery API workshop

I thought it would be a good idea to do a session on APIs - introducing people to the world of APIs. How APIs are and should be a developer’s best friend. How you shouldn’t be reinventing the wheels, but put the power of APIs to good use while developing kickass apps. The session got a really good response. Clearly API is a topic that’s catching the curiousity of developers - seasoned and amateurs alike.

The API Explorer demo was very well received. Seeing what a data a specific endpoint returns without writing a line of code and without reading pages after pages of documentation was obviously a huge draw for developers.

A huge shout out to Jay Neely (who incidentally was part of the team that won the Mashery spot prize at AngelHack back in feb for their app Related River) & his Barcamp team for putting up such a great event and also to Microsoft for hosting the event at their beautiful NERD office. Yup, that’s the name of their office - North England Research & Development.

Just PAUSE…..

….and Drop the SOAP

Apparently Vic’s Klout score improved drastically over that weekend. I bet this pic has a lot to do with that!