Schedule: Fundamentals sessions

Knowing where to start with an API program is difficult. Most development teams have been building APIs for years, but it's different when the goal is to become an API-centric team or company. James Gough, Nick Ebbitt, and Matthew Auburn bootstrap the basics from building your first API, using OpenAPI specification to describe and version your APIs, and deploying behind a gateway. Read more.

Almost every software system is developed with good intentions but under difficult conditions and technical debt is built step by step. The whole system is woven into a messy big knob and every adjustment becomes an incalculable cost screw. Carola Lilienthal explains how you can organize and further develop your source code to prevent the emergence and increase of technical debt. Read more.

"It's just semantics." Semantics is all about meaning. If there's one thing we struggle with and need to get better at, it's the search for and clarification of meaning. Kevlin Henney explores how the very act of software development is an exercise in meaning—its discovery, its formulation, its communication. Paradigms, processes, and practices are anchored in ways of arriving at meaning. Read more.

Stefan Tilkov takes a look at some of the ways you can determine whether the development efforts you're undertaking suffer from too much or too little focus on architecture. You'll examine a number of real-world examples that are intended to inspire either admiration or terror and try to find some recipes of how you can get more of the former and less of the latter in your own projects. Read more.