Since Twilio and I parted ways a few months ago, I’ve had a number of people ask “what’s next?” and for a while I didn’t have an answer. I just wanted to stop and catch my breath. In fact, I planned to take December off. That lasted all of 4 days..
First, I decided to write a book on API design (pictured). After putting together an outline and realizing the sheer enormity of the project, I teamed up with James Higginbotham of LaunchAny who also happened to be working on a similar project. We first merged and fleshed out our outlines and then started writing. As of February 14, we’ve officially released the first version of “A Pragmatic Approach to API Design.”
Next, in order to support the book and other efforts, James and I have started building the API Developer Weekly newsletter.
In addition, I’ve kept my hands in a number of events including a pair of private hackathons and the nearly-infamous FU Weekend.
Next, I was tapped to serve as the Track Chair for the Coding & Development Track for DrupalCon Austin. As of today (Feb 18), the Call for Presenters is still open. It closes on March 7th.
Next, I started doing API design and development for a few companies. One I can share about is Techstars London company Clarify. The premise is simple, what Google Search does for text, we can do for audio and video. We start with simple indexing and keyword analysis and peel back the layers to get emotional content and sentiment analysis. Overall, it’s a pretty freakin’ cool system and there’s a huge amount of potential.
And finally, I started doing a flock of API development in the Open Source space. I built a helper library for the new Marvel Comics API. I’ve started to formalize an API for web2project using the Slim framework and I expect it to be fully functional for our v4.0 release this summer.
So overall, while things have been exciting on my end, I can’t talk about the most interesting things.. yet.