New member: Brendan Finke

[gtallen1187]

@HealthAPI/owners,

I want to introduce you all to a new addition to the helmet squad: @brendanf22

Brendan went to school with @matthewplunkett and I at Tulane, and while he was there, he started ChapterSpot - a company that helps organizations efficiently manage all aspects of their groups/membership. Since the days of school, the company has grown to become very profitable, employ roughly ~10-15 people i believe (brendan correct me if my numbers are off), and he now spends his time turning down acquisition offers, many of which include two commas in their dollar figure.

Considering he's already built a successful company from the ground up, i figured he _might_ have some valuable contributions to make here.

@brendanf22 - in terms of next steps, i think your immediate value add here would pertain to API architecture/design. What would a potential technical architecture look like for this API? What would you recommend as a set of first steps towards implementation? What hardware/software requirements are we facing? What hard lessons did you learn during round 1 of your API design experience that we can potentially try and avoid here? How would you describe the impact that Jason Derulo has had on the pop music experience for the millennial generation?

[gtallen1187]

from an equipment standpoint, may make sense to look at these guys: https://catalyze.io/products

[boxuancui]

@brendanf22 Welcome abroad! Shouldn't really say "abroad", because we are still melting irons to build the ship. 😃

[gtallen1187]

@boxuancui another reason you probably shouldn't say "abroad" is because the word you're looking for is "aboard". We're using a ship metaphor Bo, not going on vacation together to europe.

[boxuancui]

@gtallen1187 I swear I meant to type "aboard", god knows why it became "abroad", TWICE! You have to trust my English because I passed TOEFL with flying colors in order to get to this country.

[gtallen1187]

haha i'm just messing with yo @boxuancui.

but on a more serious note, since i didn't know what TOEFL was, i had to look it up. And apparently, these test results expire after two years...

[brendanf22]

Hey guys, sorry for the delay. Thanks for the welcome @boxuancui. Nice to meet ya.

I may regret posting this because I haven't read all the other threads so far... but this sounds fun. To respond to your questions @gtallen1187...

1. Announcing API changes and expecting consumers to update their code for them is a big headache and it's something we didn't plan for very well. I think we should use a gating system where when you provision a new consumer, we timestamp their version. So if I sign-up today, my version of the API is 07_20_2015 (or something like that). That way if we make changes tomorrow that go into production, we create an adapter for clients from 07_20_2015 compatible with our bleeding edge.

2. Let's not hurry ourselves through terminology/nomenclature for our endpoints/objects. It's worth researching which terms are best to use.

-I'm not sure of all our use cases just yet, but let's make sure we plan for users/consumers to be able to have multiple accounts if we think it will ever be relavent to us. (To give an example, you know how on FB you can "be yourself", or act "as a Page"? On Twitter, however,you can't access your personal and company twitter handles with one-login).

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Before I take a stab at the design/architecture questions... can I see some really rough example requests? I'd like to get a sense of what our objects/endpoints might be.

[gtallen1187]

@brendanf22 - would the example in the main README be what you're talking about, or are you looking for something in a bit more detail?