Here in the Cisco Developer Hub, we often think of APIs as application programming interfaces. However, May is API Month in the USA, celebrating Asian and Pacific Islander heritage (also known as Asian/Pacific American Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Month, and, as decreed in 2023, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month).
This recognition originally started as Asian/Pacific American Week in the late 1970s and became a month-long event in 1990. What better way to kick off the first Trivia Tuesday in May than to recognize some of the great contributions to technology from amazing members of the AAPI community!
Ajay V. Bhatt invented the universal serial bus (USB). Although hailed as a tech "rock star", he remains humble and shares credit for this invention with others. Does anyone remember this Devvie USB drive?
Jerry Yang was a co-founder of Yahoo!, one of the biggest portals at the beginning of the public internet. Another bit of Tueseday trivia: Yahoo is an acronym for "Yet another hierarchical officious oracle."
Steven Shih Chen and Jawed Karim were co-founders of YouTube. Karim's video, "Me at the Zoo", was the first video ever posted on their site. YouTube remains a great resource for our community. The Cisco DevNet channel has tons of great content, including the Daily Standup and DevOps Shop... subscribe to stay up to date!
Reshma Saujani is the founder of Girls Who Code, which is a non-profit organization that focuses on building programming skills for girls and young women. Saujani contributed to a Cisco blog a few years ago on "Overcoming the Bravery Deficit".
Eric Yuan was one of the early engineers at Webex back in 1997, which was purchased by Cisco in 2007. In fact, Yuan picked his middle initial "S" because of Webex co-founder Subrah Iyer, who was an investor and mentor for Yuan. Yuan left Webex and went on to found a video-conferencing company that you might have heard of but I won't mention here.
Of course, there are many, many more people of AAPI heritage that have contributed to the growth of technology. Got someone in mind? Please give them a shout-out in the responses below!
