My Journey with APIdays Conference

Laura La Manna
3 min readFeb 20, 2024

If I have to think of an event that represents a breaking change in my professional life, surely I have to mention my first time as a speaker at an international conference, and it happened in 2019 when I had my first English session as a tech expert about the Serverless and its relation with cost and performance.

ApiDays Paris 2023 as speaker

Last December I got the opportunity to join again live the Apiday Paris 2023. My name was on the list of speakers, but this time I didn’t join it to share my experience about some cool new tech but to share and enrich my experience as a manager in the context of the WIAs community.

This is why I believe that the WIAs community is strong and amazing

I would be still dreaming of some cool professional experience without the support of the people met through this community. Instead, every day I open my laptop with the same passion and enthusiasm as the first day, and in a perfect balance between my life as a mum and my professional life.

ApiDays Paris 2023 as attendee

After my workshop on the first day of the conference, I started to look at the rich proposals on the Agenda. I felt like a baby in front of a bucket of candies: how it is possible to have access to so amazing topics and have to choose only 1 track at a time?

My expression in front the multi track agenda

I decided to enforce my background in API Mindset and start to learn more about how AI and APIs can provide mutual contributions.

What did I bring after this session?

  • APIs as a Product: although your company doesn’t sell APIs, you have to start to think of them as an internal product, and if one day it decides to move in that direction it doesn’t mean only building public APIs
  • Observing your APIs could provide the right support to improve and enforce your API governance. Although is not tricky, observability is important to serve different stakeholders and ensure that your business requirements are met, together with security requirements. It helps ask questions about the state of the system and gives us actionable insight
  • API Guidelines, which could be a section of a more extensive internal developer portal, provide an organization standard to facilitate collaboration and make easier integration of your systems.
  • Generative AI can improve the API lifecycle by removing from the developer's activities most of the repetitive steps in document APIs and testing them;
  • AI and APIs can be integrated to improve the Customer experience, but you have to pay more and more attention to privacy and security. In general, More AI Means More APIs

Below is a list of resources that I added to my bookmarks:

What’s the next step?

It is not easy to capitalize on all the insights gathered during the ApiDays conference, especially if you had the opportunity to compare and share your experience with people who inspired you to look at new things, as well as look through a different perspective of the things that are your daily work.

Stay tuned to discover more about the next plan with WIAs community.

Amazing people met at ApiDays Paris 2023

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Laura La Manna

Cloud expert | Software Engineering | Certified Agile Coach