Impressions from Nordic APIs’ Platform Summit 2023
Last week, I attended the Nordic APIs Platform Summit 2023 in Stockholm. It was the first Platform Summit after some years of break and a groundbreaking experience for me. I got the chance to meet many people and have a lot of interesting discussions.
Workshops
I had the pleasure of co-hosting a half-day workshop on strong security with OAuth. My colleague Daniel Lindau and I discussed features in the protocol that put your OAuth integration to the next level: parameters to prevent CSRF attacks, signed requests and responses, client authentication, dynamic discovery, and registration. It was fun to challenge the attendees, but they also challenged me, and we had excellent discussions.
Next door, my colleagues Michal Trojanowski and Gary Archer had another workshop about utilizing OAuth in practice. They introduced an enthusiastic audience to the concepts and best practices of OAuth. I warmly recommend the session to anyone interested in understanding OAuth.
Presentations
The Platform Summit is not just any conference but a summit. As such, discussions and questions are also very welcome outside the workshops and sessions. The event offered different tracks with 60 talks, including a roundtable discussion and inspiring keynotes. Each track had a dedicated slot for Q&A to ensure everybody got the most out of the conference.
Most of the presentations were technical, ranging from strategy and design to platforms, demos, and security. However, the schedule also had a place for tracks focusing on business models and business strategies concerning APIs. I listened to talks on various topics, and both the technical and business-focused ones were all very insightful.
Takeaways
Interestingly enough, the business talks left the most standing impressions on me. After last week, I have a better understanding of the role and importance of APIs in a business context. I believe now that you should treat APIs as a product if you want them to become adopted. APIs may have customers that are internal or external developers, but they all deserve a good product. Get the buy-in from management, have a strategy for your APIs (like avoiding breaking change), and worry about the developer experience, that is, providing documentation and collecting feedback to make it a successful product.
I hope everyone in our industry will see the long-term positive effects of the Platform Summit. Personally, when I returned to work, I opened a ticket to improve the documentation of Curity’s mobile SDKs. That is the least I can do to improve the developer experience and show my gratitude to the community.
