API Platform Conference 2021: a successful edition
Published on September 24, 2021
On September 10th, after almost nine months of work, we invited the API Platform community and its ecosystem to our first international conference dedicated to this framework used across the world. This “phygital” event welcomed more than 150 people in Lille and 400 people online followed the English-speaking track which was broadcasted live from Livestorm.
The event took place in Euratechnologies, the first incubator & startup accelerator of France, where more than 300 tech companies are located (including our cooperative). Fifteen speakers had responded positively to our invitation to share their experiences on various subjects, all in a very warm birthday atmosphere.
The conferences #
- The day began with the opening keynote from Kévin Dunglas, who summarized the history of API Platform and presented the future of APIs with the concept of Edge Side APIs.
- Right after him, Antoine Bluchet stepped in to present the new features of API Platform 3, as well as the work achieved to integrate all these changes.
- Matt Holt then presented the best practices on how to use the Caddy web server (which replaced Nginx in API Platform since the 2.6 version), its advantages and its incredible simplicity.
- Then, Medhi Medjaoui talked about the importance of API in today’s world, and the way they govern information, facilitating communication in and in-between organizations.
- On the French-speaking track, Olivier Doucet told us the story of a failed project using poorly mastered technologies, and how it was fixed up using the safe bets that are Symfony, API Platform and Mercure.
- Mathias Arlaud then gave us a detailed explanation of the various ways to serialize our data with Symfony, when we should apply them, how to understand them, and how they’ve been integrated into API Platform.
- Justine Zahiri told us how, in her curious journey from librarian to developer, she ended up contributing to open source, and proved to us it is possible to take part in the movement whatever our level is.
- After the lunch break and its delicious vegetarian buffet, Łukasz Chruściel, Sylius core team, talked about how they integrated API Platform into its ecosystem and what they gained from it.
- François Zaninotto then showed us the React Admin components from Marmelab and convinced us to reuse them to build whole production-ready websites easily.
- Phil Sturgeon gave us an eccentric feedback about poorly designed APIs from an unnamed coworking company, and how he resolved their problem thanks to the best practices observed by API Platform.
- Robin Chalas presented the different ways available to secure our apps, with the native security component, the JWT bundle, or the OAuth2 system.
- Then Marion Agé explained the way she designed a system handling complex authorizations on a large-scale project with many different user types, real-time modification on the user's view, thanks to Mercure, in Vue.js.
- Helène Maître-Marchois motivated us to quit our jobs from conventional companies to join cooperative ones, where we could take advantage of our strong position, as developers, to change the world for the better!
- For the last two conferences of the day, Samuel Rozé presented us the particularities of the JSON-LD format and the way any data can be standardised to easily communicate; then Nicolas Grekas presented the Runtime Symfony component and its implications for functional Programming in PHP.
A significant challenge #
The organization of this event was a real challenge for our cooperative considering the sanitary context but everything went perfectly well, thanks to the respectful audience.
We are very thrilled to have been able to reunite in person after almost 2 years of events held remotely, it felt like a family reunion! This feeling continued during the community evening held at the Mama Shelter Hotel where we celebrated our 10th anniversary with our guests. On this evening we unveiled our new visual identity, which our cooperators Laury Sorriaux and Grégory Copin will be happy to present to you in future articles.
Big thanks to Cécile Helary Hamerel for the work accomplished and all the speakers for sharing their stories! See you in 2022!
