World Tour Featured Speaker: Andreas Krohn

We’re interviewing some of our key speakers so that attendees have a better idea of what’s going to be covered on our World Tour. Stay tuned for more Q&A style spotlights on API experts, and try to make it to a Nordic APIs conference!

Andreas Krohn, an API specialist at Dopter, is a also a Nordic APIs Co-Founder and hard core API veteran. This “Swedish #API junkie” is a former Senior Product Manager at Kapow Technologies turned entrepreneur. An all around API all star, Krohn is known for organizing API conferences, maintaining his API-themed blog Mashup.se, performing API consulting with Dopter, and more.

Having worked in the API space for the last 7 years, Krohn has a wealth of knowledge to impart — specifically on the theme of the API Lifeycle from the perspectives of development, use, promotion, and internal business strategies that drive success using APIs.

Krohn, giving a presentation entitled “Introducing The API Lifecycle” at three destinations on our World Tour, was asked to answer 5 questions to share his thoughts prior to the tour:

1. Tell us about your background. How did you get interested in APIs?

“Back during the Web 2.0 days I was working as a product manager for a web scraping company. We were enabling our customers to collect data from the web and build “mashups.” What we were doing was basically building APIs on top of web data, even if that was not what we called it. After that experience I was hooked and have since worked with APIs, both consulting for companies and the public sector as well as building my own APIs.”

2. What is the BEST API you have ever used or heard of?

“That’s an impossible question to answer… In general my favorite types of APIs are the ones that make a really good job in hiding complexity from the developers, i.e. making very complex systems easily available. This includes Twilio.com and 46elks.com for telecom services, Printmotor.io for printing and OverviewNews.com for news data.

3. What is the most important thing to consider when a corporation or organization creates their own API?

“I don’t see an API as a technical solution to a technical problem. Instead APIs are a tool for the whole organization to use to meet their goals.”

4. What do you think is the future of APIs?

“The way of thinking is here to stay, even if the technology will change and evolve.”

On That Note: “How APIs Are Disrupting The Way We Think”

5. You are one of the rockstar speakers of the API World Tour. Tell us why the readers should listen to your session in 100 characters or less.

“As a product APIs are both different and similar to other types of products. In some ways an API is just like any SaaS product. In some ways an API is just like any other computer program. But in some ways an API is a unique offering with it’s very own set of challenges and opportunities. In my presentation we will go through the lifecycle of an API, from ideation, through production, and to retirement. We will compare it with the life cycles of other related products and highlight where the main focus of anyone publishing an API should be.”