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Empowering Developers: Key lessons from designing Canva’s APIs with Martin Cronjé

Overview of the Talk

Discover the journey of building and evolving the Canva Developer Platform driven by a vision to build the world’s richest design ecosystem. Now, over a thousand developers are creating generative AI-powered tools, workflow integrations, design effect apps, and more for over 170+ million people using Canva across the globe.

This talk focuses on the lessons learnt in our quest to design simple, powerful APIs and the evolution of our Developers Platform. You will also gain insights into Canva’s unique engineering culture and the values that drive us.

Canva is a global online visual communications platform launched in 2013 on a mission to empower the world to design

Speaker Background

Martin is currently the Engineering Director for Canva’s Ecosystem Group and brings 15 years of experience in building high-performing software teams across the globe. In recent roles, he’s played engineer leadership roles for teams from 50 to 400 people at MYOB, Serko, and Visa. Martin has spoken on leadership, programming and systems design at events and conferences in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.