It’s kind of old news now, but my SXSW Interactive panel presentation, Developer Friendly Web Service APIs, is available in podcast form on the SXSW website. Once again, it features Carl Mercier of Defensio, Avi Bryant from DabbleDB, Leah Culver from Pownce, Ari Steinberg of Facebook. Topics covered include ideal request and response formats, strategies for reducing API changes, request throttling, and more.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Looking to get involved next year? SXSW has begun taking panel submissions for 2009.

So, SXSW Interactive is good and over. The panel went well (or so they tell me), I met some nice folk, and drank some darn good beer.

Unfortunately, things weren’t completely rosy. I made a couple of critical errors which slightly marred an otherwise brilliant weekend:

Don’t hand out the wrong business cards (as in, somebody else’s)

SXSW is a business card trading frenzy. So, a good idea is to make sure your business cards are your own. Mine weren’t.

I was sorting through my remaining business card supply half-way through the conference, and was horrified to notice that a handful were labeled “Kathy Donaghue”, a former FreshBooks co-worker who’d left the team back in August. I guess our cards got mixed up some time ago, and I hadn’t bothered to check them before handing them out. So, if you’re back from SXSW and wondering who the heck Kathy is, look no further – it was me!

MacBooks don’t have VGA-out

Unlike 99% of my web-developer peers – I don’t presently own a laptop. So I borrowed my colleague Sunir’s MacBook for the trip. As a PC-user-4-life, it didn’t occur to me that MacBooks don’t have VGA out – you need a separate adapter. So, before my presentation, I actually borrowed a second laptop just to play the slides – a Dell PC running Windows Vista (!). My street cred dropped 50% instantly.

Remember to introduce yourself during your own panel

Yep – no joke. We were about 20 minutes through the panel before I’d realized that, during introductions, I’d completely forgotten to introduce myself, or FreshBooks. Months of organizing, planning, and slide-preparing and nobody even knew who I was. Bummer!

(If you’re reading this now, I was the guy on the right.)

Bring a phone (that works)

My mobile phone company, Virgin, doesn’t offer roaming. With no connection to the outside world, I was always tethered to someone who did. Not being able to find your friends, hand out your number, find the latest party, or Twitter, was a complete drag. Never again!

Anyways, all things considered, I had a great time, and let’s face it – these aren’t big deals. Still, next year, I’ll be way more prepared … maybe.

Just a heads up that I’ll be attending BarCamp Austin 3 with some of my FreshBooks compatriots on March 7th. If the crowd’s willing, I’m hoping to get up and talk about my experiences building the FreshBooks API—what worked, what didn’t, that sort of thing.

Personally, I love BarCamp-style events over traditional conference fare. The openness, low cost, and great people you’ll find is tough to beat. I had a great time last year at BarCamp Toronto, and I’m sure Austin will be no different, judging by the names on this sign-up list (not to mention their awesome logo). Whether you’re a local or in town to catch SXSW, you should find the time to drop by.

Big news – my SXSW panel proposal, “Web Service APIs Your Mom Will Love”, made the preliminary list of 2008 programming.

I’d like to thank everyone who voted for the panel, as well as my colleagues at FreshBooks for their ruthless peer pressure in getting me to participate.

At the urging of my FreshBooks cohorts, I submitted a panel proposal to SXSW Interactive for 2008. The idea: get a bunch of developers from leading web 2.0 companies to talk about the design and implementation decisions behind their web service APIs.

So, why me? Well, one of my primary duties at FreshBooks is continued development on the FreshBooks API. I’ve had a pretty big hand in designing the request and response structure, determining which methods make the cut, writing the API documentation, and so on. It was a great learning experience, and I think it’d be great to pass that knowledge on (with the help of some others, of course) to other would-be API developers.

Whether you’re attending SXSW next year or not (hopefully you are), you can vote for the panel here. Please forgive my suspect choice of panel name :)