Presentation from my talk at APIDays+APIStrat in Berlin. The API economy has emerged as an increasingly robust and important area of the tech landscape as APIs have proliferated. APIs become fundamental building blocks in today’s software development process. They enable one company to solve a difficult software development challenge (e.g. cloud storage, in-app email, payments processing) and let other companies access that solution, rather than re-solve the same challenge during their own development process . Today the best way to do business isn’t to build it all in-house. Top companies are increasingly piecing together a composite of APIs from specialized startups. That lets them concentrate on their unique value-add rather than reinventing the wheel.

1. Giuliano Iacobelli, CEO and co-founder
giuliano.iacobelli@stamplay.com
APIs as building blocks:
let's code what matters most.

2. @stamplay
500 Million users
32 Engineers

3. @stamplay
30 Million users
13 Engineers

4. @stamplay
40B image views / day
7 Engineers

5. @stamplay
How long before we have a billion-dollar
acquisition offer for a one-engineer startup?

6. @stamplay
0
7500
15000
22500
30000
2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016
API Proliferation is exponential
The number of open API grew from ~0 to 13K in the past 8yrs.
Will more than double to >30K in the next 2 years.

8. @stamplay
“An API for everything there is.”
Yoda, Jedi Master.
APIs for everything
https://www.mashape.com/ismaelc/yoda-speak

9. @stamplay
API Explosion is transforming
software development

10. @stamplay
APIs as a product
Horizontal Vertical

11. @stamplay
Rise of data integration and data
execution platforms.

12. @stamplay
More than 77% of top apps integrate APIs.
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13. @stamplay
Stamplay uses some building blocks as well
{

16. Build vs Buy

17. @stamplay
There are no
small changes.
When you’re striving for quality

18. @stamplay
Let’s do a test.
In aYelp-like app, we want to limit the length of a
text review in the product to 140 characters,
because we may want to use SMS to send them out.
..that’s a small change, right?

19. @stamplay
LET’S ADD AN IF-STATEMENT

20. @stamplay
Think again..
• What happens when the review is above 140 characters?
• Do we crop the string, or display an error message to the user?
• If we display an error, where does it appear? What does it say?
• Who is going to write the error message?
• How do we explain to the user why we’re limiting them to 140
characters?
• How will these errors look?
• Do we have a style defined?
• If not, who is designing it?

21. @stamplay
• Who’s writing the JavaScript?
• Does the JavaScript display the same type of error as the server-side
code?
• If not, what’s the new style?
• How does it behave with- out JavaScript?
..and again..

22. @stamplay
• Who is going to write this character counter?
• Who wants to test it in our target browsers?
• Also, where is the count of letters displayed on the screen?
• What does the count look like?
• The style should change as the user approaches zero characters and
look erroneous at the limit?
• Should it stop accepting input at that point?
• If so, what happens when they paste something in?
• Should we let them edit it down, or alert them?
..and again!

23. @stamplay
Nothing comes
for free.

24. @stamplay
It’s not free because you’re talking about it.
It’s not free the verifying it was done right.
It’s not free in the communication of doing it.
It’s not not free to carry it forward.

25. @stamplay
Connect all the things!

26. THANKS!
Giuliano Iacobelli
giuliano.iacobelli@stamplay.com
@Giuliano84
https://stamplay.com