Description:

Taking time to plan your architecture before you begin the development work is like having a roadmap—or rather, a good GPS—before you begin your trip. If you don't know where you're going, you'll still end up somewhere, but it may not be exactly where you envisioned.

Your architectural plan needs to include design, performance, scalability, and availability, as well as many other considerations and trade-offs—all of which will position you to make smarter decisions as your website and applications take shape. In this online conference, three experienced developers share some of the building blocks of web architecture: cross-platform development, webhooks, and APIs. Their experience will arm you with practical takeaways that you can use in devising your own web architectures.

Confessions of a cross-platform developer - 10amPT/1pmET
Andreia Gaita

Cross-platform development is not only a challenging, technical line of work; it also changes the way you think, work, and interact with systems and software as a user and a developer. New frameworks like Electron are making it easier for developers to create applications that can run on multiple platforms, but things are never as simple as they appear. Building good cross-platform applications requires more than just the right tools.

Andreia Gaita explores cross-platform development, outlining the skills you need to get the job done. Andreia explains how cross-platform frameworks get built, what tools are used, how many platforms you can target as a cross-platform developer (hint: it's more than three), and how to go about targeting them. You'll learn how a cross-platform development focus can change the way you build code and use software.

The wonderful world of webhooks - 11amPT/2pmET
Lorna Mitchell

In an increasingly connected world, APIs are key to great tools and effective workflows. But what's better than an API? A webhook, of course. Webhooks are a central building block of modern applications, allowing systems to exchange data in response to events.

Lorna Mitchell dives into examples of webhooks currently in use in the wild, examining when a webhook is useful and exploring the internal design and structuring of webhook payloads. Lorna discusses how to work with webhooks in a scalable way regardless of your technology stack, how to receive and process incoming webhooks from an external system, and how to design and publish your own for use by partners or consumers. You'll walk away with a better idea of how to make your applications play nicely with others.

The five key features of a good API - 12pmPT/3pmET
Rob Allen

What makes a good API? Rob Allen offers a tour of five of the most important features that you should implement in your API. These features ensure your API plays well with HTTP and, more importantly, make your API a delight to work with. Give your API a competitive edge by making it sane so developers will want to work with it.