Avital Tzubeli is a Developer Evangelist at Kaltura, where they build Software-as-a-Service video solutions for all sorts of industries. Originally a backend developer, Avital knows exactly what it takes to build a great API. At Kaltura, she focuses on helping external developers, business folk, and the general public make the most out of their products.

You guessed it, Avital will be speaking at our annual Nordic APIs Platform Summit this year! A Nordic APIs veteran, we’re glad to announce Avital will return to speak about creating an awesome developer experience, and how that helps draw in the best developers.

We oftentimes forget that our APIs are meant for developers, real people who will be getting their hands real dirty with our API. Our goal is to create the best experience for them.

Trends in APIs

As with all of our speakers, we asked Avital about the trends she’s seeing in the API space. It looks like government regulation (*cough* GDPR) really is revolutionizing the industry, especially in terms of security and privacy, and that’s making OAuth a lot more popular:

With the whole GDPR boom, security and privacy have become a huge topic. It looks like tokens (OAuth2) have become more common and I imagine similar methods will be part of every API soon enough.

When we asked about the place of APIs as a business-to-business language, Avital explained how opening up and sharing APIs is the status quo in the SaaS industry:

Yes, it’s common practice today for SaaS business to expose their API for other businesses to integrate with.

Building Better APIs

Avital acknowledges that standards and best practices are imperative to improving the API ecosystem. As you might expect from a developer evangelist, she’s hot on optimizing developer experience — with great documentation and otherwise!

Documentation, documentation, documentation; interactive workflows, console, sandboxes.

Interestingly, Tzubeli says that building the API is no longer the challenge. Instead, it’s effectively productizing the API and developing it in the long term. That’s thanks to both a paradigm shift in the way we view APIs and an increase in the tools available to developers.

While I come from a development background, I must say that with so many standards and open source libraries available today, building the API is no longer that difficult. Understanding how to package and sell the API, and then measure and grow the use of that tech, is where the real challenge lies.

The Summit, The Blog, The City

Avital attended our Austin API Summit earlier this year (where she delivered a presentation on keeping client libraries up-to-date with the power of automation), so she’s no stranger to Nordic APIs events.

With our 2018 Platform Summit Platform Summit, she’s excited to see an even bigger audience and meet a whole host of like-minded API thinkers and doers.

I imagine it’ll be as fun and interesting as it was in Austin, but bigger. I picked up good speaking tips and met a handful of really fascinating people at the Nordic APIs Austin Summit and I hope to do so in Stockholm as well.

As with all of our guests, we were curious to know how she engages with the content on our blog. Needless to say, we were flattered by her feedback:

The Nordic blog was (and remains) my favorite source of API content when I started my position as a developer evangelist and was scrambling to get in the know. The articles are all super relevant and easy to understand, even for non-developers.

Finally, we asked Avital about her thoughts on the host city for our event, Stockholm. She hasn’t been yet, but she’s heard good things and alluded to a certain IKEA food favorite…

I have not been to Stockholm. I hear it is beautiful and charming, and home to some really cool architecture. I look forward to meeting locals, tasting real Swedish meatballs and exploring the city (by bike perhaps)!

Register today!