You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. This is an accurate summary of what my initial journey of evangelizing API usage was like. In this talk I will take the audience through our journey, what worked, what didn’t work and what we learned along the way.

1. Advancing Your API Strategy
in an Infrastructure World
Jaap Brasser – Developer Advocate

4. ▪ APIs?
▪ Who are we helping
▪ Open Sourcing our Efforts
▪ Closing the Loop
▪ Q&A

5. APIs?

6. ▪ Backup
▪ Cloud Data Management
▪ DR
▪ Test-Dev scenarios

7. ▪ APIs are relatively new in this space
– Legacy Tooling
– GUI
▪ Lack of understanding

8. ▪ Build from the ground up to be API-first
– We like this
▪ API endpoints classified as internal
– We do not like this
▪ OpenAPI Spec
– We definitely like this

9. Who are we helping

11. Different roles

12. ▪ Simplify API Access
– Provide SDKs and Modules
▪ Provide Use-Cases
– Simple to implement
– Well documented
▪ Documentation
– Samples
– Quick Start Guides
– Video Tutorials

13. ▪ Provide access to code
– GitHub
▪ Code
▪ Issues
▪ Allow to contribute
– Clear contribution guidelines
– Architectural documentation
▪ Provide contact
– Social Media
– GitHub

14. ▪ Provide examples
– Showcase use-cases
– Showcase integrations
▪ Simplify access
– Provide web portal instead of GitHub

15. Open Sourcing our Efforts

16. ▪ Put API documentation on GitHub
▪ Create Quick Start guides
▪ Verified by technical writers
▪ Unexpected Contributions
▪ Created a separate portal

17. ▪ Unified labels
▪ Standardized README.md
▪ Created Quick Start Guides
– For projects on GitHub
▪ Created video resources
▪ New Repository creation through Slack

18. Closing the loop

19. ▪ Provide clear paths to interact
– Email
– Twitter
– Slack
– GitHub
▪ Labels and organize issues
– Provides opportunity for contributions
– ‘first-timer’, ‘helpwanted’

20. ▪ Some handholding required
– Not everyone is familiar with GitHub
– Provide content to help people onboard
▪ Active project, active contributors
– A lot of activity and contributions

22. jaap_brasser