I attended the Austin Homegrown API meet up at Wright Bros and Brew last week. Titled “Where the Rubber meets the Road,”—heh—there were about 25-30 people there, about half API-oriented and half car-oriented. Honestly, with interfaces and integration as a theme, all attendees were API-oriented. One of the people there simply to network had lunch with Lanham Napier (former Rackspace CEO) that very day, pitching his startup, though he never said what it was. Must be stealth time for his startup. Felt like quite the Austin moment.
The format was two talks, the first was from a startup in Austin, CarServ. He showed their early findings when using the Edmunds Vehicle API to write an application that small maintenance shops can use to find out what maintenance any car needs. Their REST API contains a lot of data and this startup wants to make that easily available to non-dealership service providers. It’s a Ruby app. Edmunds provides a registered trademark “True Cost to Own” and “True Market Value” and I think someone should build a calculator for “True Time to Sell” based on service recommendations. (Someone do this!) The developer said they’ve had great response from Edmunds any time they’ve asked for increased rate limits.
The second talk was an API mashup with the Uber API and Google Calendar API “to make sure I’m never late again.” This was with Keith Casey about his proof of concept and it was fantastic, because it’s meant to be more thought-provoking than code-complete. I especially appreciated that he’s not exactly a fan of Uber’s business practices. The blog post at http://caseysoftware.com/blog/future-transportation-today has more info, and the code is here: https://github.com/caseysoftware/uber-project. He already got contacted by a product manager at Uber but doesn’t plan to work further on the idea. To me, the city planning discussions are as interesting as the mashup itself.
I was one of three women there, I believe, and there were three lawyers, one of whom was a woman, so there was a interesting mix. I think they were interested in the Edmunds data API legalities with data re-use. For sure there were job seekers there. Did you know that actual car designs have 450,000 requirements that have to be tracked? Yipes, that’s a whole other level of complexity in design.
All in all, a thought-provoking meet up with a great mix of technologists who think like entrepreneurs. Integrate, innovate, interface, repeat. The next Austin API meet up is April 6th at Capital Factory.