I really enjoyed this podcast interview with Raymond Ho, my brother who’s a web/mobile developer. You’ll get a sense for what we talk about at the dinner table 🙂

With my podcast, I’ve wanted to capture these conversations I have with people – friends, family, people in the industry and expose that to the world. This is the stuff we talk about all the time!

In episode 4 of This Mobile Life, we discussed these topics:

1. What is an API First Approach?
2. The importance of API’s in a mobile world
3. How to optimise geo-location on mobile
4. How to write less bugs with test driven development (TDD)
5. Lean startup in TDD environment
6. Testing on web vs mobile
7. When should you have a responsive vs mobile app strategy?
8. News articles load faster on Facebook mobile app & Apple News app
9. A seamless world with cross platform experiences
10. Swift vs Objective-C
11. Product development process for the Food Blogged app.

You can download it here on iTunes. It is also available on podcatcher apps TuneIn and Stitcher for iOS & Android.

Play it here on the web by pressing the play button.

Show Notes

Food Blogged: Eat where the bloggers eat! Food Blogged shows you the restaurants and cafes nearby that have been reviewed by prominent food bloggers. If you like Urbanspoon (Zomato) and Eatability try out this app, guaranteed to make it easier to decide where to eat. Food blogged is only available on Australian iTunes app store.

API for dummies, Apigee

API First Approach

I liked this explanation from Logan which I found in the comments of “What is An API First Strategy” by API Evangelist.

“I would like to add that an API-first strategy is one where the API serves as both a pattern of an enterprises IT architecture as well as catalyst for engagement.

In a nutshell, an API-first strategy is a systems paradigm shift

– from a centralized, engineered mechanical system made up of subordinate parts serving as means to deliberately designed ends
– to a decentralized, organic and evolving ecosystem where the individual actors can be spontaneously enfranchised or co-opted by any other actor / set of actors to serve new purposes.

This allows the system to be more flexible, respond more quickly and behave more dynamically to suit unforeseen purposes. I believe the API-first paradigm is thereby more scalable by nature.

Prudent separation of information from presentation through APIs should be the first and next step for most organizations with large IT infrastructures. To be more specific, this provides a number of efficiency benefits. To just name a few: by modulating infrastructure with solid APIs, stakeholders can create / hack together production-ready applications faster, more securely and more reliably.

This approach warrants a new form of IT team protocol wherein the curation of APIs is front-and-center to their role. When designing a new product / service, the design of it’s API should be commensurate. As the product or service makes it’s way to production, making sure the API is well documented, easy to use / as conventional as possible, hooked up with analytics, secure and prepared to scale should be a given (these are frequently included in any self-respecting API management solution). In so doing, not only might the enterprise benefit from the speedier and more rewarding ‘dog-fooding’ of these services / resources, if they ever decide to commercialize or publicize / open them up to users outside their organization (the decision to flip the switch itself being informed by the aforementioned analytics), it’s just an invite / key request away.”

This is also a good read on API first approach: “The Emergence of API-First Development“.

I hope you like the episode and please leave us some feedback on the app store and on my blog!

Cheers,
Matt Ho