Month: September 2017

Teaching best practices to Design, Build, Secure and Monitor APIs

In this blog, I want to share my experience after having created many APIs using different approaches and technologies. I am going to encapsulate a simple process that will help you construct APIs, starting from scratch with an idea or requirement and move it all along to a happy consumption.

The best part of APIs is that they are microservices enablers, which implies that they are not technology prescriptive, so in this blog you will see that your APIs can be implemented using any technology or programming language.

I decided to use “Jokes” as the vehicle to explain the APIs construction best practices, mainly because jokes are a simple concept that anyone can relate to, but also because I want you to feel compelled to consume these APIs and by doing so, get a laugh or two.

My original idea with jokes is to:

  1. Get a random joke.
  2. Translate the joke to any language.
  3. Share the original or the translated joke with a friend via SMS.

This is the high-level view of how our end solution will look like:

Continue reading “Teaching best practices to Design, Build, Secure and Monitor APIs”

Intelligent Bots improve customer experience

“Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold” Does this sound familiar? Imagine the frustration at the other end of the line your customers have to go through while the query might be as simple as “what is my credit score ”?

In this new digital world if a customer has to wait for 15–30 mins to speak to an agent there is something fundamentally wrong with the way an Enterprise operates. Throwing more agents to respond to queries or moving your call center to a developing country is definitely not the way you want to scale and reduce your call time to few seconds. How do we solve this problem? We need an intelligent virtual assistant or a chatbot that can understand the natural language, process the query, talk to one or more systems in the background, aggregate the information from these systems and provide a response instantly so that the customer can easily digest.

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Apiary designed APIs tested using Dredd

APIs are becoming the window to the digital assets of the modern business. Well documented, well governed and easy to use APIs are key to their successful uptake, longevity and associated business success. Yes, I did say well documented. In this instance I am talking about the documentation required to describe the APIs capabilities in a manner that is meaningful for your ultimate audience, the “API Consumers”, however it will also provide the template for the API Developer to develop their code from. In the modern business climate, we probably don’t want to produce War and Peace, we simply want to take a minimum viable approach to our API documentation. But where would I find a capability that will simplify our task as API Designers, capture the design documentation for our APIs, allow us to do some initialise testing to validate the usefulness of our design before any code is cut, and also have the documentation ready for consumption by team members and interested parties using a standards based approach. Where indeed ! Look no further than Apiary.io. Continue reading “Apiary designed APIs tested using Dredd”

A New Hackathon Experience

This week I was attending a customer event. It was an interesting learning experience on different levels. It was a great opportunity to meet some people that I would not normally would be.

It was a hackathon put on by MLC Life Insurance (#MLCLifeHackathon) and we (as Oracle) were happy to support them as one of their partners. I’ve been to other hackathon events but they were organised differently. So I was curious to see what their objectives were. It would too easy to be cynical. With an open mind, I was happy to be part of their journey.

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