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October 15-17th, 2019, Vancouver, Canada

Two years ago, the OpenAPI Initiative took over the reins of APIStrat, the API Strategy Conference that the 3Scale team ran the previous seven years. We hosted APIStrat in Portland in 2017 and Nashville the next year, and attendees of both events raved about what they learned, the conversations they had, and the connections they made in the delightfully friendly API community.

Over the years, APIStrat has delivered a huge amount of value to the API community. However, like all great APIs, conferences also need to evolve to ensure longevity. That’s why today we’re announcing ASC (the API Specifications Conference) — a new event that embodies our vision for that evolution.

There is a growing trend for technical conferences to focus more on specific technologies or techniques, giving conference attendees a wealth of content on their particular area of interest. In recent years, the focus of the API community has gravitated towards the tools and technologies defining, describing, and managing API boundaries. Many of the challenges we face are related to that interface between the API provider and the API consumer. Using some kind of contract has become the norm, but developing and managing those contracts presents its own unique set of problems and opportunities to explore.

ASC is dedicated to bringing the community together to present and discuss solutions focused on the entire lifecycle of the interface aspect of APIs. We chose the conference name explicitly to convey that this event is not focused exclusively on using OpenAPI descriptions.

The OpenAPI Initiative has never seen OpenAPI as a one-size-fits-all solution. That’s why ASC welcomes participation and content from the communities working on AsyncAPI, gRPC, GraphQL, OData, etc. as well as HTTP APIs. This event is designed to allow attendees to share and understand the options that are most suited to the applications they are trying to build.

Be sure to save the date for ASC’19, hosted by the OpenAPI Initiative from October 15-17 in Vancouver, Canada. We hope to see you there!

To be entered in a random drawing to receive a free registration to ASC, please provide us with your email address to keep you apprised of the latest information about the conference. You must complete the form by May 24. Drawing will be held on May 28.

The members of the OpenAPI Initiative Technical Steering Committee have announced the latest release of OpenAPI Specification 3.0.2. Note: This release is a patch release and none of these modifications change the behavior of the spec.

As a patch release, the latest changes were made to improve the specification in terms of readability and accuracy. Please read the release notes on on our GitHub repo here.

If you are interested in getting involved in the development of the spec, join us Thursday’s at 9a.m. Pacific for the public, open meetings of the Technical Steering Committee.

• Added clarification to case sensitivity of keys in maps.
• Reworked the Data Type table, removing the Common Name to reduce potential confusion.
• Clarified the description of the Server Variable Object’s default field.
• Fixed various examples.
• Clarified operationId is case sensitive.
• Clarified the default value of the Parameter Object’s deprecated field is false.
• Added recommendation to not use the Parameter Object’s allowEmptyValue field as it will be removed in a future version.
• Fixed the description of the Media Type Object’s schema field.
• Clarified the description of the Responses Object’s response codes field description.
• Clarified that the Schema Object’s additionalProperties field has a default value of true.
• Fixed a small wording issue in the Discriminator Object description.
• Fixed the Security Scheme Object description to include reference to the use of API Keys in cookies.
• Fixed the description of the Security Requirement Object.

The API Strategy & Practice Conference, known as APIStrat, is a conference focused on the API economy, and brings together experts, leaders, and members of the community to discuss what we each see on the ground every day. Happening September 24 – 26 in Nashville, Tennessee this is a conference you don’t want to miss.

We wanted to bring you the top reasons why we think you should attend the event. AND if you register today (September 14), you will save an addition $200 off of the conference. Don’t wait!

Here are the top reasons you’ll want to be at this event:

 

1. New Trends and Innovation in the API Space and Beyond: Along with learning the latest trends in the API space, you will also hear from speakers providing an expanded perspective of the technology world we live in today, including keynotes Virginia Eubanks, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY discussing Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor and Kate O’Neill, author of Pixels and Place and lead at KO Insights, discussing Tech Humanism: Integration, Automation, and the Future of the Human Experience.
2. Learn about best practices in the API space: The conference will uncover best practices when it comes to APIs as products, API portals, API design, and API usability. A few keynotes and talks include transforming the enterprise to an API platform; microservicing like a unicorn with Envoy, Istio and Kubernetes; and Evolving API: designing while requirements are still in flux. Come to the event and take away ideas that you can use right away!
3. Nashville, Tennessee: The music city of America has a lot of amazing things to do, see, and eat! There’s the classics like the Grand Ole Opry, Country Music Hall of Fame and The Station Inn for bluegrass music. Of course, there’s also plenty of fun walking tours if you are into food, drink, music, history and ghosts (every town has to have one)! Nashville is definitely a city on most folks bucket list, so get it checked off and attend an awesome conference too. And maybe you’ll even discover a rising star if you hit The Listening Room Cafe.
4. Hands-on workshops: If you are the type of person who learns by doing, there are a lot of amazing hands-on workshops that you can join from practical SecDevOps for APIs to turning external services into internal APIs. Whether you are an experienced API practitioner or just getting started, there’s a workshop for you.
5. Social Activities and Networking: One of the top choices to attend this event or any Linux Foundation event are the social activities that are provided to you, like our fun run (you can walk or jog too). Plus, this is a great place to network with your peers, many rate the hallway tracks at APIStrat as one of the top reasons to attend year after year.
6. Diversity and Inclusion: We want to make sure everyone feels welcome and safe at our conferences. We offer special items like a quiet room if you need a physical space where conversation and interaction is not allowed, a nursing room and child care as well as special communication stickers, and other features to make this event as accessible as possible.
7. OAS workshop: Among the awesome workshops that we have, we are also hosting a pair of unique OAS workshops. The beginner workshop is a hands-on introduction to the OpenAPI Specification 3.0. Directly following the intro session will be the OAS advanced users’ workshop and will conclude with what features are on the horizon. Attendees of these workshops will leave with a working knowledge of OASv3 which has become the defacto standard for describing APIs.

See the full lineup of speakers here and the register here.

Please join us for an advanced hands-on workshop on OpenAPI 3.0. Be sure to bring your own laptop to participate. This will be an OpenAPI Specification Technical Overview/Workshop.

A hands-on training session with more advanced features and 3.0 specific features, suitable for developers who already know v2 and want to know what’s new in the current version. Ends with a preview of the future release.

You will learn about:

1. Schema Objects
2. External References
3. Form Data
4. Links and Callbacks
5. Security Schemes
6. XmlExample

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With APIStrat coming up in just under two weeks, I have been focusing on how the power of open source technologies can bridge disparate programming languages, and how the emergence – actual dominance – of the cloud has made it a requirement.

Are the problems my team faces common to anyone delivering developer tools for a cloud platform?

Many months ago, as I chatted with my ex-collegue David Justice, who has much the same responsibilities as myself (but for Microsoft Azure rather than Oracle Cloud), I realized that the problems my team faces at Oracle Cloud are common to anyone delivering developer tools for a cloud platform. My chat with David turned into a complex discussion of not just what our shared problems were — delivering developer tool support for constantly innovating cloud platforms in an ever-more-fragmented developer landscape — but also what our solutions to these problems were. Some commonalities in our solutions emerged, as well as some differences — with pros and cons to each of our approaches. We decided this discussion was a pretty informative one, and thought it might be useful to a wider audience. And so our APIStrat talk was born! — ‘Delivering Developer Tools at Scale: Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Perspectives’!

Deliver high-quality SDKs and documentation in real-time

In our talk at APIStrat, myself and David will discuss how to leverage the OpenAPI Specification and tooling, as well as the OSS community, to create huge productivity gains — whether you’re delivering a cloud, an app, or anything in between. We live in a cloud-paced world in which developers use a plethora of programming languages, frameworks, and DevOps tools. Like other applications, the cloud is powered by many ever-advancing REST APIs. Providing idiomatic experiences for developers in their languages of choice at the pace of service innovation is impossible without automation.

Have I caught your attention? If so, come learn how the Developer Experience teams at Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure deliver high-quality SDKs and documentation in real-time for Java, .NET, Python, Go, JavaScript, and Ruby, without breaking a sweat, at APIStrat. Looking forward to seeing you there!

This post was written by Joe Levy of Oracle Cloud

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