Learning Materials from My RootsTech 2015 Session on APIs for Genealogy

The week before last, I taught a session titled “APIs 101: What are they? What do they have to do with Genealogy?” at the big RootsTech 2015 conference in Salt Lake City. The room was jam-packed, standing room only, with people turned away due to lack of space. A huge relief for me, since I had fears that this nerdy of a topic might only attract a dozen people outside of the developers who would be attending more advanced Developers Track sessions.

My class was designed specifically for the average family historian. Not for computer programmers or web developers. For those genealogists who like to play with tech, and who want to understand what all the fuss is surrounding these things called APIs. Therefore, I use as little technical jargon as possible. And hope to provide genealogists with a new set of tools that can be incorporated into their daily research workflow. As well as some resources for those who want to get their hands dirty learning more about APIs.

Class Slides

My presentation is licensed via Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, so you are welcome to reuse and modify for non-commercial purposes, with attribution back to me. I have made the slides and notes downloadable from SlideShare.

If you aren’t a SlideShare user, you can download my PPT with notes from my Dropbox.

The notes have been recently added to my slides; I did not have or use any notes during the live presentation. But since I anticipate that many who will view the slides were unable to attend my class, I wanted to provide the information that I verbally conveyed at the conference. Those who did attend my conference session can benefit from the added details and clarity in the notes, since we were so rushed for time at RootsTech.

Both the PPT and PDF versions of my notes include live hyperlinks to view the online examples.

Class Handouts

• PDF version slides and notes: available from my Dropbox.
• Course Syllabus (updated!): available from my Google Drive.

Enjoy! Have fun playing! And I hope to hear from you!