QCon New York June 15-19, 2020 | | API Design Lessons Learned: Enterprise to Startup

Abstract

When faced with a blank canvas and numerous API design decisions to make at the start of a new project or a new company, how does one go about that? Finding the design fit for APIs — private and public alike — is usually a pursuit aided by experience and reflections. In this talk, we explore lessons learned at big companies like Microsoft and LinkedIn, and adapt the insights drawn from them to fit a fast-growing startup.

API design choices for green-field projects subsume a wide spectrum: security, programming languages, transfer protocols, tools and frameworks, data formats, parameter composition, etc. Instilling insights from successful API designs and avoiding costly API design bugs help fast-growing startups design their APIs sensibly in the face of ambiguity and unknowns.

Speaker: Mohamed El-Geish

Sr Director of Engineering @Workfit

Mohamed is passionate about empowering people around the world to communicate securely and effectively using online services that provide great experiences. Before joining Workfit, Mohamed was an engineering manager at LinkedIn working on feed personalization and relevance, home for the fastest growing monetized products at LinkedIn, in addition to building a human-in-the-loop platform, and incubating venture bets by leading “moonshot” projects. Earlier at Microsoft, Mohamed led a team of engineers working on email delivery for Outlook.com; before that, he worked on a PaaS system that powered up online services with 400M+ users; and earlier, he worked on Visual Studio. Mohamed finds "ikigai" in machine learning, ultra-scale systems, debugging, and software craftsmanship.