Flat HTTP API Design & How to challenge your product owner by Peter Hilton

Agenda

17:30 Doors open
18:00 Buffet
19:00 Flat HTTP API Design
20.00 Break
20:15 How to challange your product owner
21:15 Drinks

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Giveaways

2 free tickets for JVMCon (Nov. 25-27, Cologne)
2 free tickets for droidcon London 2019 (Oct. 24-25, London)
1 JetBrains license

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About the talks

Flat HTTP API Design
Because flat design isn’t only for the user interface

The way we design web APIs and write API docs is highly structured, natural to programmers, and wrong. HTTP API descriptions typically look nothing like the requests and responses they describe, and the underlying design often hides much ugliness. This creates extra work for the developer to understand the API, and figure out how to translate that to code. It also makes it harder to spot bad API design. Instead, you need more readable API documentation that doesn’t waste your time, and APIs that don’t get to hide their design flaws.

This presentation introduces Flat HTTP API Design (FHAD) - a better way to design and describe your HTTP API. FHAD API docs leverage HTTP’s own structure together with some layout and typography to document by example, in as much detail as you like. Attendees will learn to see API documentation in a new way, which they can use to write more effective documentation with less effort, and to design better APIs. More practically, attendees will learn which REST API design design mistakes to avoid from Dr Evil’s World Domination API.

How to challenge your product owner
10 things your PO should know that you don’t

As an agile software developer, you want to understand your product owner’s expertise, so you can work well together with mutual respect. This is harder than it should be, because everyone tends to assume that they know everything (that’s worth knowing), and that everyone else’s job is just some typing and a few meetings.

This presentation describes what happens when you don’t have a proper product owner, and introduces some challenging questions that product owners work on answering. In practice, the product owner role is often an impossible job, especially when it isn’t full-time, so you shouldn’t expect your product owner to be able to answer all of the questions straight away. You might enjoy working together on the challenge, though.

About the speaker

Peter Hilton is a product manager, writer, speaker, trainer, and musician. Peter’s professional interests are business process management, workflow automation, software functional design, agile software development methods, and software documentation. Peter currently consults as a product manager for Signavio in Berlin, and delivers the occasional presentation and workshop.