I have maintained an open source product that is controllable through an API for about nine years. And I intentionally did it as an experiment to try to play with a versionless approach to an API. So even though it's evolved considerably in the nine years, it's done so without requiring an upgrade from consumers and there's some downsides to that that we'll talk about in the talk, but the upsides is a much easier consumer experience. And so I wanted to talk about various strategies and patterns that I've used to help maintain that consumer experience through a long lived, flexible API.

The persona would be for those developers, architects, technical product managers who are interested in treating API as a product, maybe more strategic APIs, maybe they are partner or public APIs or strategic inside the enterprise, and looking for patterns of evolution that take into account not just implementation complexity, which is a common concern today, but also consumption complexity.

Partly, I want them to walk away with more empathy for what it means to be on the receiving end of an API that goes through rapid versioning and just the busy work required to keep up with the pace of evolution. And then a little bit of awareness in terms of the tradeoffs around implementation complexity and interface complexity.