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API Design: The Musical – Live from Drupalcon LA

2 Min. ReadEvents

We are just a few sweet days away from the power that is Drupalcon, Los Angeles. If you’re going I hope you are ready for another great conference.

Some years ago at my first Drupalcon I left feeling like I really wanted to embrace Drupal as much as I could with the secret hope that one day I might be a web chef, working for Four Kitchens. Well, both of those things have come true and I think if it’s your first time that you’ll find the community to be welcoming, intelligent, and motivated.

This year I was very pleased to have a session accepted, I am very grateful that this is my second year to be chosen to present. However, I am especially excited for this one. You see in my past life, I studied music composition, it’s a huge part of my life, always has been and always will be. I’ve never had an opportunity to combine my two careers, that is until now.

As a kid (and actually as a freshman in our expository writing course) I always loved and learned from Schoolhouse Rock. It taught me a lot. I can still sing the chorus to Nouns, or Verbs, or Conjunction Junction for that matter. So i thought, hmm, I wonder if I might be able to do that in technology?

As for a topic, well, – over the past few years i’ve had the pleasure of working on many API / headless sites, including the Jimmy Fallon site (you can see Andrew Berry from Lullabot and myself present on our experiences in our session from Drupalcon Austin last year). I’ve become quite familiar with the process of API design, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t intimidating at first (in fact sometimes it still is). So I thought this would be a great topic to break down into song.

In my session, API Design: The Musical – you’ll hear songs about:

  1. api resources
  2. hateoas (hypermedia as the engine of application state)
  3. HTTP methods
  4. how to design apis
  5. as well as one breaking down Fielding’s dissertation about RESTful architecture – yeah, that’s pretty much the first time i’ve ever set a doctoral dissertation to music

If you’ve never designed an API this should be a good primer, if you have and you’d like to hear me put those concepts to song come on down, and if you can’t believe there is a musical session, come on by too – I hope I can get a chorus or two stuck in your head.

Oh, and if you are in LA and are looking for something todo on Wednesday night and would enjoy a little bit of musical entertainment, consider coming to Kulak’s Woodshed at 8 PM at 5230 1/2 Laurel Canyon Blvd. North Hollywood where I’ll be playing some of that other music I’ve written for a live taping.