Making your API a 1st Class Citizen at JustGiving (ie dogfooding your API)
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This document discusses strategies for making an API a first-class citizen. It provides lessons learned from JustGiving's experience growing API adoption among charities. Some key points include: choosing a major launch partner to validate the API; being prepared for a slow adoption process requiring support; and making the API easy to use through documentation, sandboxes, and community support. Internal "dog-fooding" or using the API within the company provides benefits like faster experimentation, wider API knowledge, and easier development of new products. The document advocates continuing to support innovation through hackathons and meetups to promote tech for good causes and further growing the API ecosystem.
Making your API a 1st Class Citizen at JustGiving (ie dogfooding your API)
- 1. Mmmmm Dog Food – Making your APIs a First Class Citizen
- 2. Jamie Parkins – Product Manager (@jamieparkins) - Introduction to JustGiving - Growing API adoption in a new market Pawel Sawicz – Developer Evangelist (@sawiczpawel) - Making your API a first class citizen
- 7. What is JustGiving? •World’s largest donation platform for charities & not for profits •24 million users, across 164 countries •>100,000 new registrations a week •1 million fundraising pages created in per year •£1m+ a day raised for global causes •£3bn+ raised for global causes since launch •Our technology enables people to build #tech4good
- 9. Diving into the numbers 5k strong developer community Top 50 UK charities using our API 1m + pages created via the API API partnerships (Co-Op, Spotify etc) 25% of revenues via API created apps
- 10. But this was not always the case! 50% of charities had limited or no understanding of APIs 50% of charities had limited or no understanding of APIs Source: JustGiving API survey Feb 2014
- 11. • Cancer Research - our # 1 charity • Raised > £60m on JustGiving in 2014 alone • Big enough to have an innovation team • In 2010 expressed a desire to “stay ahead of comp” and to “leverage tech” • Today all their fundraising campaigns are driven by JustGiving API • Took 3 years to get to this stage • Lots of blood, sweat and tears • Test & learn, test & learn… • This trust in our system was a industry wide game changer • They singularly validated our API stack Lesson 1: Pick a significant launch partner
- 12. Lesson 2: Be prepared to put in the hard yards
- 13. • Get out and meet your future clients (e.g. charities, agencies) - Show them real life, tangible examples • Find ways to get round lots of red tape / bureaucracy - Test things quickly (prove/disprove, move on) - Co-fund projects • Be prepared to coach, guide, review and tweak - Demos, flow diagrams etc • Train up those that can broadcast the API message - Account Managers, Bus Dev, PR etc • Prepare for a slow life cycle of development - And meantime plan for what they will want next Lesson 2: Be prepared to put in the hard yards
- 14. Lesson 3: Invest in making life easy for others
- 15. • Focus on “time to Hello World” • Pick an API service provider that suits your needs • Live or die by your documentation • Provide a reliable sandbox • Build and nurture your community in help groups or forums. Zero in on your biggest advocates • Empower other staff to answer questions – grow the knowledge • Plan for CRM & Developer outreach (emails, customer care, doc updates etc) Lesson 3: Invest in making life easy for others
- 17. What does dog-fooding mean?
- 18. Tip #1: Experiment faster than ever before
- 19. Tip #2: Internal teams become clients
- 20. Tip #3: Finding bugs
- 21. Tip #4: Can create private end points / services for internal use
- 22. Tip #5: Wider knowledge of the API across your development team
- 23. Tip #6: Makes moving to a micro service easier to do
- 24. Tip #7: Build a team and a company culture around the API and its future potential
- 25. Tip #8: Launch new products…fast
- 26. Tip #9: Using tools like Postman for consuming API
- 28. What’s next? 1. Encourage, amplify and celebrate innovation 2. Building and getting behind the #tech4good movement • Hacks • Meetups • PR 3. Continue to extend the JustGiving platform to meet need 4. Growing number of partnerships 5. International
- 29. Thank you follow us @jghackers
Editor's Notes
- #7: In short, we have built a platform, that supports a world where everyone can give will give. We enable the traditional fundraising model of sponsorship by bringing it online We are NOT a charity. We reinvest our profits into technology £1bn raised since 2002 Can donate in multiple global currencies
- #8: So who exactly are JustGiving? Some quick stats.
- #18: Questions to ask : Who here has an API at their company? Then Who here uses that API internally? dogfooding - Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is a slang term used to reference a scenario in which a company uses its own product to test and promote the product. (source wikipedia). In short way, you use your product in your daily job, like github does, they keep github srouce code in Github :) Incepction....
- #19: First benefit that I can spot now is that you can very easy prototype and experiment new projects, instead of messing up with internal infrastructure all you need to do is consume existing public API.
- #20: The bigest benefit, in my opinion is that dev team that use public API for their work become your client, and they can very easy evaluate everthing what you have done. If you introduce something new they will quickly evaluate this, constant feedback.
- #21: By having dev team as your customers I have to mention about finding bugs, it's another great pro, you will find bugs erlier than before and it may affect less customers of your API.
- #22: By having dev team as your customers I have to mention about finding bugs, it's another great pro, you will find bugs erlier than before and it may affect less customers of your API.
- #23: Wider knowledge about public API across dev team, it's very hard to keep whole dev team aware of API and customers that consume our API, especially when only API team is contribution to code, or were building software.
- #25: Questions to ask : Who here has an API at their company? Then Who here uses that API internally?
- #26: Next step in dogfooding was to consume our SDK and tools that we have created for our community, http://widgets.justgiving.com/ is using https://github.com/JustGiving/JustGiving.Api.Sdk.JavaScript. Also we created a complete collection of our resources for postman https://github.com/JustGiving/JustGiving.Api.Tools.Postman and loads of developers in JustGiving