When Doug and I worked on the flow and content for the “Services Powering Experiences” keynote at MIX10, we ended up with something that would have taken hours to do it true justice. Having to cram it into a 30 minute keynote was very difficult, and as you can imagine, many details of the story weren’t able to be fully articulated, and much of the “on the fly” coding that we both prefer had to be sacrificed for the sake of time.
Fast forward a few months, the story has gotten tighter, VS2010/.NET4 has shipped, and Doug and I have decided to take the “Services Powering Experiences” love around the world. Over the next 6 weeks we’ll be hitting seven different cities, and doing a day long workshop that combines demos/discussions and interactive coding. We’ve got some pretty cool projects to discuss/show off, and a lot of lessons learned when developing web APIs using OData and Azure.
Keep in mind though, this isn’t a Microsoft/.NET lovefest. This workshop is about web APIs in general, where we just happen to be using OData/AtomPub/JSON as the primary subject matter (any general-purpose discussion has to choose a concrete example). We’ll be demoing/writing JavaScript applications, iPhone applications, and would love to have developers from any of those camps attend. It would be amazing to have some Java, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk (Doug would love this), etc. developers there, so please come by and share your thoughts/experiences.
In addition to the demo/discussion side of things, we’re also going to have an afternoon of interactive coding time, where we’d love to see attendees show off anything cool they’re building in the web API space, or experiment with consuming/exposing data via a web API. Once again, any platform is welcome. Anyone with an entrepreneurial itch should also make sure to come hang out. We’re definitely going to be discussing monetization, and what business opportunities exist in the world of web APIs.
The schedule, further description, and agenda can be found here. If you’re not able to make it, but live in one of those cities, and would like to get together for drinks or something, please e-mail me (joncart at microsoft dot com). As always, I want to make the most of the time abroad, and it’s always great to hang out with the local devs.
