Meetups and events are the connective tissue of the API community, and they’re where the human reality of this work has always lived for me. For all the blog posts, specifications, and tooling, the API community cohered in physical and virtual rooms — the meetups, the conferences, the unconferences, the local user groups where the people doing this work found each other and discovered they weren’t alone. I’ve spent an enormous amount of my career in these spaces, speaking, organizing, attending, and just being present, because the events are where evangelism becomes embodied. You can reach people through writing, but you build a community through gathering, and the API community was built, in large part, through a sustained culture of meetups and conferences that gave practitioners a place to convene.
API Craft was one of the spaces that mattered most, and it modeled what a healthy community gathering could be. I wrote about defining API Craft in 2012 — a self-organized series of meetups, started around an Apigee-sponsored Google Group, that became a genuine community space for sharing and developing knowledge in the open. API Craft wasn’t a vendor pitch-fest; it was practitioners gathering to work through hard problems together, online and in person, over beers at OSCON and in local meetups. The API Craft hypermedia panel in Detroit in 2014 was one of the richest technical conversations I participated in, precisely because it brought the right people into a room to argue productively. API Craft embodied the ethos that the best API community spaces are about genuine knowledge-sharing among peers, not marketing — and that ethos is what made it valuable.
APIStrat was the conference that became the center of gravity for the API community, and I was deeply involved in it. APIStrat — API Strategy and Practice — began as an initiative from 3Scale and others and eventually became part of the OpenAPI Initiative under the Linux Foundation, and it grew into the place where the key conversations in the API space happened. I wrote about maintaining the API community at scale through APIStrat in 2016, because as the community grew, the conference became the annual gathering that held it together — the place where the practitioners, toolmakers, standards contributors, and storytellers convened to push the whole field forward. APIStrat ran in San Francisco, Amsterdam, Chicago, Austin, Nashville, and beyond, and each gathering was connective tissue, the place where relationships formed and the field’s direction got debated. The conference wasn’t just talks; it was the community physically assembling, which is something no amount of online content can replace.
The local meetups and user groups were the grassroots foundation, and I championed them as much as the big conferences. I spoke at the DC API User Group, including memorable sessions like the one at NPR, and tracked the broader landscape of API meetups — I did a roundup of API meetup groups across North America in 2015 because the local, recurring, in-person gatherings were where the community actually lived day to day. Nordic APIs in Scandinavia, API Days globally, the Paris API meetup, the Dallas-Fort Worth API Professionals — these regional and local gatherings were the distributed nervous system of the API community. The big annual conferences were the heart, but the local meetups were the capillaries, reaching practitioners everywhere and giving them a regular, accessible place to connect. I cared about both because a healthy community needs both: the big gatherings that set direction and the local ones that sustain everyday connection.
The expanding conference landscape was something I tracked because it reflected the growth and health of the field. I wrote in 2014 about the expanding API conference landscape and identified, as early as 2013, five separate API event series running — a sign that the community had grown large enough to sustain a whole ecosystem of gatherings. The proliferation of API events was evidence that the field had matured into a genuine community with its own culture, its own recurring gatherings, its own circuit. I spent years on that circuit, and the cumulative effect of all those events was the formation of a real community — people who saw each other year after year, who built relationships and trust through repeated gathering, who collectively constituted the API space as a human community rather than just a technical domain.
The honest reflection, which I’ve shared candidly, is that the events both sustained the community and exacted a real cost, and that the model has had to evolve. The travel and the constant presence required to be part of the event circuit took a genuine toll — I’ve written about the impact of travel on being the API Evangelist, and about the need to balance in-person evangelism with virtual. The events were essential to building the community, but the relentless circuit was not sustainable for the people on it, including me. And the model has shifted, with virtual gatherings becoming more central, especially after the world changed, and with my own move toward community stewardship reflecting a recognition that the next chapter of this work is about tending the community thoughtfully rather than just maintaining a punishing event schedule. But the core truth remains: the API community was built in rooms, through gathering, through the meetups and conferences where people convened. The events are where evangelism becomes human, where the abstract community becomes a room full of actual people, and where the relationships that sustain the whole field get formed. I’ve said many times that the community saved me — that there were hard stretches where the people in this community were what kept me going — and it was in the meetups and conferences, in the gathering, that I found that community. The events are not peripheral to the API story; they’re where the human heart of it has always been.
References
- Definition Of API Craft
- I Am Speaking At NPR For The DC API User Group Next Thursday In Washington DC
- Let’s Talk APIs In Scandinavia With Nordic APIs
- Five Separate API Event Series In 2013
- The Expanding API Conference Landscape
- A Roundup Of API Meetup Groups In North America
- Maintaining The API Community At Scale (APIStrat)
- Balancing Virtual API Evangelism With In-Person
- Join Me For A Fireside Chat At The Paris API Meetup This Week
- API Evangelism Is Equal Parts Internal, Partner And Public Outreach
