2019-02-19 Tech Panel Meeting

Date

Feb 19, 2019

Participants

• @Mike Judd

• Deepak Goyal

• @Ammu Irivinti

• @Marc Hadley

• @Katherine Feldman

Goals

Discuss feedback from Tech Panel on:

• New: API implementation guidance

• Updated (v1.1): API Guidance

  • Some edits made throughout

  • Updates to Error Handling section

  • Updates re: JSON schemas in the Versioning RESTful APIs section and the API Definition section

• Additional concepts that would benefit from similar guidance.

Discussion notes

• Overall, it is nice to see guidance maturing and including modern recommendations and best practices.

• Sections of the guidance that connect abstract principles with concrete examples at CDC -- these are very helpful to make these principles more understandable.

  • Showing examples of things we can leverage without reinventing the wheel could also improve buy-in of this guidance

  • Action: Take another pass through existing guidance to see if there are other such examples we can add.

• In API Implementation Guidance, it would be helpful to link to examples of demonstrated workflows / best practices for implementing APIs with existing frameworks.

  • Action: Look for and link to examples using Java, .NET, R (plumber library)

• Question: why is there a recommendation to render YAML in the API Design Guidance?

  • To clarify: the recommendation is to use YAML to represent metadata about the API, not as a data exchange format

• Suggested next steps for additional guidance:

  • How to broaden the audience for existing guidance? Could we tie it to the strategic IT plan and/or link to it from other documents to improve discoverability?

    • Action: Engage with Chief Public Health Informatics Officer for suggestions on bringing this guidance to more stakeholders within CDC.

• Next Tech Panel meeting to be scheduled as and when it is needed.

Action items

Pulled from above discussion notes: