AustinApi.com meetup

Beers, soft drinks and water provided.

Agenda:

- Pre-talk social time, start talks by 7:30

- Recap of last meetup

- Rules of engagement for new attendees

- Speakers

- API-related jobs available from members

- Post-talks social time

Speakers:

Bryon Jacob - Principal Architect

Bryon is currently Principal Architect at HomeAway, where he’s been a key part of shaping the technology and product vision from early in the company’s history – through the launch of the flagship homeaway.com (http://homeaway.com/) brand, the successful integration of 18+ acquisitions, and into the challenges faced by a successful public company operating a global online marketplace. He’s built a playbook of strategies for remaining a responsive partner to the needs of the business while balancing technical debt in a highly complex technological environment.

Bryon has been active in the Austin entrepreneurial community, mentoring several local start-ups and as a mentor with Capital Factory ( http://capitalfactory.com/ ) and 3 Day Startup (http://3daystartup.org (http://3daystartup.org/)/). In addition to his own real estate tech start-up, which led him to becoming an early employee at HomeAway, Bryon has previously worked for Trilogy (where he co-founded a spin-off start-up that was later acquired), Marsh McLennan (the company that acquired that start-up), and Amazon.

René Parra - Software Architect

René X. Parra has served at HomeAway for 4 years as a Software Architect. Contributions to date at HomeAway include mentoring the Core API team, overseeing code reviews, deployments, releases and support as well as introducing RabbitMQ and OAuth technologies and setting baseline best practices with respect to monitoring, scaleability and SLA adherence. Before HomeAway he served on the Developer's Council at eBay. He graduated with an S.B. In EECS from MIT in 1994. His passion is technology and seeing others succeed.

Jose Falcon - Software Engineer

Jose Falcon is a Software Engineer at HomeAway. He thinks about APIs, programming languages and developer tools. When he is not programming, he is studying Japanese.

Abstract

HomeAway has acquired 18+ companies in a very short amount of time, and we've got a large number of legacy systems with complex integrations to show for it. Many of the applications we've acquired were not architected for the scale of our global marketplace. We rely on a number of applications that are not well-tiered and are coupled to critical databases in unfortunate ways. Over time, the strategy is to replace all of these systems and fix the architectural flaws, but it's a multi-year effort and we needed to be able to build new applications on the existing infrastructure in the meantime without perpetuating the problems. Our solution was to build a comprehensive REST API as a façade to our legacy infrastructure, giving application developers a clean, simple interface to build against, and allowing new systems to coexist with the old on the same platform while we work through the re-architecture at the bottom layers of our system. 18 months into the project, virtually all application development is being done against our REST API, doing almost 100 million API calls a day and growing.