Karthik: LinkedIn has massive scale (in terms of user base), as well as significant complexity in the structure of APIs we expose to our clients on account of diverse features. In addition, we also move fast and release new code to our API server/web clients multiple times a day, and mobile apps once a week. A huge army of developers, designers, site reliability engineers, product managers, engineering managers, project managers work smoothly in tandem to make this happen. Since the product moves so fast, designing an API that evolves elegantly and minimizes engineering work for adding new features, while being relatively stable is crucial.

Aditya: The talk is going to be around the evolution of how we started with entity-based modeling. This is where you describe an entity that's sent to the client and then the client does the transformation. We are moving from this approach to a place where we have our own language that the client can use to stitch everything together as it needs. The talk will have what we've learned from this approach, and how it helps us shoot for shipping features to consumers without making client-side changes. The goal is to monitor and power these experience directly from the server side.