Secrets of Awesome JavaScript API Design

Hey Everyone!

Come join us for food, drinks and JavaScript at our May Meetup this Thursday at Capital Factory -- Our speaker is Brandon Satrom from Kendo UI -- see you there!

Take care,
Johnathan

TOPIC:
It doesn’t take long for most developers to sniff out a poorly-designed JavaScript API. Within minutes of reading about or coding against a new library, most developers can intuit whether their long-term relationship with that library will be a pleasant or unfortunate one. While documentation, buzz and other factors certainly play into that conclusion, the largest influencer of that snap conclusion is the “feel” of the API itself. APIs are developer UX: A good one raises a developers enjoyment; a bad one sends it plummeting.

As developers, we know what good and bad JavaScript APIs “feel” like, and yet we struggle with designing the kind of APIs that we enjoy using. But principles of good JavaScript API design do exist, and it’s possible to extract them from several key libraries in the the proliferating JavaScript landscape. In this article, Brandon Satrom will do exactly that, digging into the design aspects of popular libraries like jQuery, Backbone, Modernizer, Kendo UI and others to enumerate the designed-in qualities of these libraries that make them not only popular, but a pleasure to use.

SPEAKER:
Brandon Satrom (@BrandonSatrom) is Program Manager for Kendo UI and is based in Austin, TX. An unabashed lover of the open web, Brandon loves to talk about HTML, JavaScript, CSS, open source and whatever new shiny tool or technology has distracted him from that other thing he was working on. Brandon has spoken at national, international and online events, and he loves hanging out with and learning from passionate designers and developers. He has an inextinguishable love for writing and, in addition to having several articles featured in publications like MSDN, .net Magazine, Web Standards Sherpa and InformIT, he recently wrote a book on building Windows 8 apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which was released in early 2013.