API Platform Conference 2022
France is more than just cheese, wine, and the Eiffel Tower. Our neighbors know not only how to develop excellent PHP Frameworks, but also how to organize awesome conferences!
A part of our PHP-Team took the chance to attend the API Platform Conference 2022 in person, which took place in Lille (France).
For quite some time, the API Platform is a staple in our tech stack, so it is almost mandatory for us to get the latest news and meet the people building the ecosystem. We attended the first ever API Platform Conference in 2021 online, because of Corona restrictions, so we were more than excited to finally attend in person this year.
The English track of the 2 Conference days (15.09. + 16.09.) was so much packed with great topics, it was not possible to skip any of them. Lucky enough for us that the talks in the 2. track were held in french, so we didn't have to switch around and choose the ones were interested in the most.
Here are some of our personal highlights:
Day 1 started off with a blast, Kévin Dunglas, Creator of API Platform, released version 3.0 live on stage! He also gave information on some new features, the new Roadmap, and the upgrade path from previous versions.
Dilemmas and decisions. What we’ve learned designing the new Sylius API
Łukasz Chruściel, Core Team Lead at Sylius, gave insights about the integration of API Platform in Sylius, the hard decisions the Team had to make while designing the API, and the adoption of API Platform v3.0 in an upcoming release.
Fighting impostor syndrome: a practical handbook
Ever felt the feeling that you are always behind the skills of your coworkers, even when you are successful by your own? Do you always fear failing? Don't worry, Marine Gandy (platform.sh) has your back! She made us feel better by telling us that almost the majority of people are feeling the same from time to time and ... it's just normal for us humans! Also, a little singing exercise for the audience was included, and a lot of fun!
Opening Keynote - A deeper look into API Platform 3
The keynote for Day 2, held by Antoine Bluchet (aka Soyuka) from the API Platform Core Team, was all about the new features in version 3. He not only told us about the new Providers and Processors, which makes your code more readable and unifies the process of serialization for item and collection operations but also the improves handling of subresources, which are just normal resources by themselves.
What's New in Caddy, the webserver of API Platform
Caddy, the default Webserver of the API Platform Distribution, was highlighted by Francis Lavoie (Caddy Team Member). He spoke about the upcoming release of v2.6 (available by now) and both, existing and new features like the "Live config API" or the built-in Certificate Manager, which can handle Certificate Renewal for you.
Finding the path to scaling API success Most of us know the struggle: Should the new resource go into the existing API or should we create a new one? Darrel Miller, API Architect at Microsoft Graph and OpenAPI Initiative, has also the answer to the question whether you should version your API or not (Hint: you probably shouldn't, really).
In between while grabbing some snacks and, especially, in the evenings (or should I say nights?) we had a ton of great conversations with the speakers and other attendees, even while playing some fun games together. It was great to see familiar faces and to make new contacts. Overall it was a well-planned event that we would love to attend again in 2023!
The next stop for us will be the SymfonyCon 2022 in Disneyland, Paris. So if you want to get in touch, meet us there!