The APIdays Melbourne agenda is up and the consensus is that this will be the best APIdays yet! Hyperbole or not, we’re really excited by the program that we’ve been able to put together.

In a digital world, APIs are the expression of your business. Whether internal or external, APIs represent the operating system of your insurance company, your bank, your agency, your supply chain, your cloud, your FinTech startup. If we’ve learned only one thing from the last decade of interoperability, it is that protocols don’t matter as much as the way you manage your APIs. It’s not what you do but how you do it.

Good API management is vital and APIdays Melbourne is bringing together the best experience in API management from Australia, Europe and the United States. 

Our keynote speaker Matthias Biehl is an author, educator and consultant known to most of you through his API-University series of books covering every topic worth knowing about modern APIs. Matthias continues his prolific output with his new book - Building Digital Ecosystems with APIs - and this will be the topic of his keynote. You might even get a signed copy!

We’re also delighted to welcome back Mehdi Medjaoui, founder of APIdays and coauthor of the book Continuous API Management - Making the Right Decisions in an Evolving Landscape. Mehdi will share his knowledge and experience on API management gleaned from his work with API Academy and as an API consultant to leading European and US companies, as well as to government bodies such as the EU Commission.

David Freeman ran the public API program for Telstra, one of Australia’s iconic companies. We’re pleased to have David share his experience and advise on how to monetise APIs. How to get started and what are the key opportunities or pitfalls you need to be aware of. 

Developer experience is a critical element of API success and Carmen Chung will share her experience from both sides of the API portal - on API design, API documentation and creating developer experiences to rave about - in a good way!

Speaking of documentation, it is an oft under-appreciate labour, combining art, story-telling, technology and a whole lot of love. Bringing multiple stakeholders together to collaborate on the documentation process is the topic of Bec Martin’s presentation. She describes her development of documentation DevOps and using automation to bring reliability to the change process. 

Management includes protection, and security is the message from Aaron Parecki on how to use OAuth 2.0 to protect your APIs and the valuable data they encapsulate. Aaron will deal with advanced topics such as JWT, scopes and multi-factor authentication.

APIs have always had both an internal and an external aspect - the future of API management is moving inward and becoming more fine-grained. Rod Cope describes how API management is extending into microservices architecture to create service meshes that handle cross-cutting API concerns for your microservice implementations.

That’s about a quarter of the conference experience we have lined up for you. Exhibitions, workshops and a cocktail party - I haven’t even started on the business strategy topics, the case-studies, the open banking, the microservices architecture and the emerging technologies. I’ll write about that in the coming days.

APIdays happens on September 19th and 20th at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Tickets are on sale now with early-bird prices available for a limited time.