I ❤ APIs OCTOBER 13, 2015

How to Grow and Measure Your API Program

Andrew Mager, Developer Advocate @MAGER

• 1997 - lespaul.com

• 2005 - Planet Blacksburg

• 2006 - ESPN

• 2007 - CNET

• 2010 - SimpleGeo

• 2011 - Spotify

• 2014 - SmartThings

• 2015 - Postmates

Who am I?

Spotify NYC, 2012

How do you start an API program?

London Music Hack Day, 2012

• How is your API unique?

• What is the purpose of

your API? • Commercial • Partner/Private • Experimental/

Research/Government

• Who do you want to use

your API?

• Tell the world with a great

developer website.

Birth of an API

Music Education Hack Day, New York 2013

How do you grow your API program from nothing to

something?

• Product owner of the API

• Developer experience • Tools, libs, changelog

• Education • Docs, tuts, workshops

• Partnerships/BD

• Marketing & community

• Internal advocate

What does a developer

advocate do?

Music Hack Day Edinburgh, 2012

How do you find a developer advocate?

• Socially fluent • Fosters community • Clear, coherent speaking • Willingness to learn • Patience • Eagerness to teach • Technical • Empathetic • Lack of ego • Readily available • Inspirational • Time management • Product management • Fun

Skills of a great

developer advocate

Tim Falls, keen.io

The best developer advocate might already work at your

company.

• Logical, inventive, pragmatic. • Always looking for the next big

problem to solve. • Learning new technologies

constantly. • Testing the limits. • Independent, sometimes

stubborn. • Day jobs feed their weekend

hack ideas. • Short attention-span. • More than a developer, many

personalities.

Understanding the hacker

ethos

Music Hack Day NYC, 2012

• Add them on Github, DevPost,

Lanyrd, Github, Twitter,

Dribbble, and even LinkedIn. • Engage again and again. • Encourage them to contribute to

open source projects. • Send them monthly

newsletters. • Vote up and answer on Stack

Overflow. • Invite them to all types of

events. • Offer office hours. • Continue their hacks.

How to flirt with a

developer online

The (not too distant) Future

• Parse - https://www.parse.com/customers • Twilio - https://www.twilio.com/showcase/ • Uber - https://developer.uber.com/showcase/ • Stripe - https://stripe.com/gallery • Google Maps - https://developers.google.com/maps/showcase/ • Keen.io - https://keen.io/#stories • Apple Watch - http://www.apple.com/watch/apps/ • YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/yt/dev/showcase.html • Facebook - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/showcase • Pebble - http://developer.getpebble.com/examples/ • Spotify - https://developer.spotify.com/showcase/ • Github - https://github.com/showcases • Android Developer Stories - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r36OJaeMo4

Showcase projects built using your API

How do you measure the success of your API?

• Monthly active API users • Daily API calls • Apps/projects published • Pull requests/forks/stars • Website analytics • Social media • Email signups • Partners • Meetup attendees • Hacks created • Swag given out • Feedback reported • Beers consumed

Success by the numbers

Way Out West Hack 2013, Göteborg, Sweden

What about the metrics you can’t track?

• Developer happiness • Event interaction • Word of mouth • Good will in the community • Time spent hacking offline

Measuring the unmeasurable

HackMIT, 2015

THANK YOU!

Questions?

@PostmatesDev http://postmates.com/developer

@mager (Twitter, Github, Instagram) http://mager.co