>> Live from Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE! Covering DevNet Create 2019, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Cisco DevNet Create 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier, we've been here all day, talking about lots of very inspiring, educational, collaborative folks, and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE Anne Gentle, developer experience manager for Cisco DevNet, Anne, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So this event, everything's like, rockstar start this morning with Susie, Mandy, and the team with the keynotes, standing room only, I know when I was walking out. >> I loved it, yes. >> Yes, there's a lot of bodies in here, it's pretty toasty. >> Yeah. >> The momentum that you guys have created, pun intended. >> Oh, yes. >> No, I can't take credit for that, is really, you can feel it, there's a tremendous amount of collaboration, this is your second create? >> Second create, yeah, so I've been with DevNet itself for about year and a half, and started at Cisco about three years ago this month, but I feel like developer experience is one of my first loves, when I really started to understand how to advocate for the developer experience. So DevNet just does a great job of not only advocating within Cisco, but outside of Cisco as well, so we make sure that their voice is heard, if there's some oddity with an API, which, you know, I'm really into API design, API style, we can kind of look at that first, and kind of look at it sideways and then talk to the teams, okay is there a better way to think about this from a developer standpoint. >> It's great, I love the API love there, it's going around a lot here. DevNet create a cloud native vibe that's kind of integrating and cross-pollinating into DevNet, Cisco proper. You're no stranger to cloud computing early days, and ecosystems that have formed naturally and grown, some morph, some go different directions, so you're involved in OpenStack, we know that, we've talked before about OpenStack, just some great successes as restarts, restarts with OpenStack ultimately settled in what it did, the CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, is kind of the cloud native OpenStack model. >> Yeah, yeah. >> You've seen the communities grow, and the market's maturing. >> Definitely, definitely. >> So what's your take on this, because it creates kind of a, the creator builder side of it, we hear builder from Amazon. >> Yeah, I feel like we're able to bring together the standards, one of the interesting things about OpenStack was okay, can we do open standards, that's an interesting idea, right? And so, I think that's partially what we're able to do here, which is share, open up about our experiences, you know, I just went to a talk recently where the SendGrid former advocate is now working more on the SDK side, and he's like, yeah the travel is brutal, and so I just kind of graduated into maintaining seven SDKs. So, that's kind of wandering from where you were originally talking, but it's like, we can share with each other not only our hardships, but also our wins as well, so. >> API marketplaces is not a new concept, Apache was acquired-- >> Yes. >> By a big company, we know that name, Google. But now it's not just application programming interface marketplaces, with containers and server space, and microservices. >> Right. >> The role of APIs growing up on a whole other level is happening. >> Exactly. >> This is where you hear Cisco, and frankly I'm blown away by this, at the Cisco Live, that all the portfolio (mumbles) has APIs. >> True, yes, exactly. >> This is just a whole changeover, so, APIs, I just feel a whole other 2.0 or 3.0 level is coming. >> Absolutely. >> What's your take on this, because-- >> So, yeah, in OpenStack we documented like, two APIs to start, and then suddenly we had 15 APIs to document, right, so, learn quick, get in there and do the work, and I think that that's what's magical about APIs, is, we're learning from our designs in the beginning, we're bringing our users along with us, and then, okay, what's next? So, James Higginbotham, I saw one of his talks today, he's really big in the API education community, and really looking towards what's next, so he's talking about different architectures, and event-driven things that are going to happen, and so even talking about, well what's after APIs, and I think that's where we're going to start to be enabled, even as end users, so, sure, I can consume APIs, I'm pretty good at that now, but what are companies building on top of it, right? So like GitHub is going even further where you can have GitHub actions, and this is what James is talking about, where it's like, well the API enabled it, but then there's these event-driven things that go past that. So I think that's what we're starting to get into, is like, APIs blew up, right? And we're beyond just the create read. >> So, user experience, developer experience, back to what you do, and what Mandy was talking about. You can always make it easier, right? And so, as tools change, there's more tools, there's more workloads, there's more tools, there's more this, more APIs, so there's more of everything coming. >> Yeah. >> It's a tsunami to the developer, what are some of the trends that you see to either abstract away complexities, and, or, standardize or reduce the toolchains? >> Love where you're going with this, so, the thing is, I really feel like in the last, even, since 2010 or so, people are starting to understand that REST APIs are really just HTTP protocol, we can all understand it, there's very simple verbs to memorize. So I'm actually starting to see that the documentation is a huge part of this, like a huge part of the developer experience, because if, for one, there are APIs that are designed enough that you can memorize the entire API, that blows me away when people have memorized an API, but at the same time, if you look at it from like, they come to your documentation every day, they're reading the exact information they can give, they're looking at your examples, of course they're going to start to just have it at their fingertips with muscle memory, so I think that's, you know, we're starting to see more with OpenAPI, which is originally called Swagger, so now the tools are Swagger, and OpenAPI is the specification, and there's just, we can get more done with our documentation if we're able to use tools like that, that start to become industry-wide, with really good tools around them, and so one of the things that I'm really excited about, what we do at DevNet, is that we can, so, we have a documentation tool system, that lets us not only publish the reference information from the OpenAPI, like very boring, JSON, blah blah blah, machines can read it, but then you can publish it in these beautiful ways that are easy to read, easy to follow, and we can also give people tutorials, code examples, like everything's integrated into the docs and the site, and we do it all from GitHub, so I don't know if you guys know that's how we do our site from the back side, it's about 1000 or 2000 GitHub repos, is how we build that documentation. >> Everything's going to GitHub, the network configurations are going to GitHub, it's programmable, it's got to be in GitHub. >> Yes, it's true, and everything's Git-based right? >> So, back to the API question, because I think I'm connecting some dots from some of the conversations we had, we heard from some of the community members, there's a lot of integration touchpoints. Oh, a call center app on their collaboration talks to another database, which talks to another database, so these disparate systems can be connected through APIs, which has been around for a while, whether it's an old school SOAP interface, to, you know, HTTP and REST APIs, to full form, cooler stuff now. But it's also more of a business model opportunity, because the point is, if your API is your connection point-- >> Yes. >> There's potential business deals that could go on, but if you don't have good documentation, it's like not having a good business model. >> Right, and the best documentation really understands a user's task, and so that's why API design is so important, because if you need to make sure that your API looks like someone's daily work, get the wording right, get the actual task right, make sure that whatever workflow you've built into your API can be shown through in any tutorial I can write, right? So yeah, it's really important. >> What's the best practice, where should I go? I want to learn about APIs, so then I'm going to have a couple beers, hockey's over, it's coming back, Sharks are going to the next round, Bruins are going to the next round, I want to dig into APIs tonight. Where do I go, what are some best practices, what should I do? >> Yeah, alright, so we have DevNet learning labs, and I'm telling you because I see the web stats, like, the most popular ones are GitHub, REST API and Python, so you're in good company. Lots of people sitting on their couches, and a lot of them are like 20 minutes at a time, and if you want to do like an entire set that we've kind of curated for you all together, you should go to developer.cisco.com/startnow, and that's basically everything from your one-on-ones, all the way up to, like, really deep dive into products, what they're meant to do, the best use cases. >> Okay, I got to ask you, and I'll put you on the spot, pick your favorite child. Gold standard, what's the best APIs that you like, do you think are the cleanest, tightest? >> Oh, best APIs I like, >> Best documented? >> So in the technical writing world, the gold standard that everyone talks about is the Stripe documentation, so that's in financial tech, and it's very clean, we actually can do something like it with a three column layout-- >> Stripe (mumbles) payment gateway-- >> Stripe is, yeah, the API, and so apparently, from a documentation standpoint, they're just, people just go gaga for their docs, and really try to emulate them, so yeah. And as far as an API I use, so I have a son with type one diabetes, I don't know if I've shared this before, but he has a continuous glucose monitor that's on his arm, and the neat thing is, we can use a REST API to get the data every five minutes on how his blood sugar is doing. So when you're monitoring this, to me that's my favorite right now, because I have it on my watch, I have it on my phone, I know he's safe at school, I know he's safe if he goes anywhere. So it's like, there's so many use cases of APIs, you know? >> He's got the policy-based program, yeah. >> He does, yes, yes. >> Based upon where's he's at, okay, drink some orange juice now, or, you know-- >> Yes, get some juice. >> Get some juice, so, really convenient real-time. >> Yes, definitely, and he, you know, he can see it at school too, and just kind of, not let his friends know too much, but kind of keep an eye on it, you know? >> Automation. >> Yeah, exactly, exactly. >> Sounds like great cloud native, cool. You have a Meraki hub in your house? >> I don't have one at home. >> Okay. >> Yeah, I need to set one up, so yeah, we're terrible net nannies and we monitor everything, so I think I need Meraki at home. (laughing) >> It's a status symbol now-- >> It is now! >> We're hearing in the community. Here in the community of DevNet, you got to have a Meraki hub in your, switch in your house. >> It's true, it's true. >> So if you look back at last year's Create versus, I know we're just through almost day one, what are some of the things that really excite you about where this community of now, what did they say this morning, 585,000 strong? Where this is going, the potential that's just waiting to be unlocked? >> So I'm super excited for our Creator awards, we actually just started that last year, and so it's really neat to see, someone who won a Creator award last year, then give a talk about the kind of things he did in the coming year. And so I think that's what's most exciting about looking a year ahead for the next Create, is like, not only what do the people on stage do, but what do the people sitting next to me in the talks do? Where are they being inspired? What kind of things are they going to invent based on seeing Susie's talk about Wi-Fi 6? I was like, someone invent the thing so that when I go to a hotel, and my kids' devices take all the Wi-Fi first, and then I don't have any, someone do that, you know what I mean, yeah? >> Parental rights. >> So like, because you're on vacation and like, everybody has two devices, well, with a family of four-- [John] - They're streaming Netflix, Amazon Prime-- >> Yeah, yeah! >> Hey, where's my video? >> Like, somebody fix this, right? >> Maybe we'll hear that next year. >> That's what I'm saying, someone invent it, please. >> And thank you so much for joining John and me on theCUBE this afternoon, and bringing your wisdom and your energy and enthusiasm, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> For John Furrier, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from Cisco DevNet Create 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)