Third post about my first ever (recorded) live coding session given at the Manning API conference. In previous post, I encountered various problems. Two of them were related to not delivering the session like one of my regular slide deck presentation. I wanted to add titles and have speaker’s notes. In this post, I’ll show you how I solved those two problems with OBS, VS Code and a little bit of magic.

Second post about my first ever (recorded) live coding session. So, here I was in my previous post: ready to record myself coding and talking without any slides… But I didn’t told the whole story, I actually struggled a lot before actually being able to record myself coding and talking. In the beginning, I had planned to do far more stuff and differently than what people had seen. In this post, I’ll talk about how I prepared content and realized that it was not working well.

I did my first ever (recorded) live coding session at the Manning API conference. During 30 minutes I talked and coded … without any slides; that was totally new to me. While it started well, preparing and recording this session turned out to be quite complicated. At some moment, I was totally desperate and I thought I wasn’t going to make it. But I did it and learned a lot of stuff that deserves to be shared. In this first post, I’ll talk about how “it started well”: setting up OBS, mic, cam and VS Code to record myself speaking and coding.

If you want to discover the OpenAPI Specification format, this video is for you! In my first ever (recorded) live coding session, given at the 2021 Manning API Conference, I demonstrate basic, advanced, and even hidden features that will help you to efficiently create complete, accurate, and maintainable API descriptions when designing documenting APIs.

An API gateway is a proxy that sits between API providers and their consumers. Its main role is to ensure that only authorized consumers consume some APIs. But API gateways usually come also with features such as request/response transformation and some of them even allow to code complex orchestration. Such transformation features can be very useful if used wisely. But they also can give terrible ideas with terrible consequences.

How many times people realized that an API was not so secured despite being exposed on an API gateway? Too many times. While being a must have to securely expose APIs, an API gateway will not do all the security work for you. Security in general, and API security in particular, is a matter for everyone. Let’s see what is the job of an API gateway and what you still have to do to actually securely expose APIs.

When reviewing API designs, I often encounter operations such as GET /resources?queryParameter=value where the query parameter is required. Consumers won’t be able to make that request without providing this parameter and a correct value; that’s usually a problem. Indeed, at best it will ruin developer experience and at worst it is a sign of design smell. Let’s see why.

Nobody expects the API inquisition! Literally. When creating public or private APIs, an organization must work hard on creating the best possible developer experience or DX. That requires to ensure that API designers “do their job well”: creating APIs that fulfill actual needs and are easy to understand and use. This is the aim of governance which may help creating the best APIs or may slowly killing the organization, depending on the designer experience, the other DX, it provides.

For many, governance is a scary word, but it’s up to us, API practitioners to make that change and make people love it. That could be done if we build a human centered and pragmatic API governance focusing more on helping and training people than controlling and coercing them

What if I tell you can run Postman collection inside Github Actions and so easily automate all the things as long as they provide APIs? Sounds interesting right? So let me show you how I migrated my Jekyll blog publication workflow to Github Actions and how I used Postman collection to clear my Cloudflare cache. Bonus: You may also learn a few things about DX and API design.