March 2021 at AsyncAPI

Read February 2021 at AsyncAPI for the update from February.

In case you do not have time to read this article, maybe take time to listen to the news. Let me know what you think about such an appraoch.

Q1 2021 came to an end. Let me summarise our targets, revenue, and forecasts 😃

This month:

Slack members up by around 100 (reached 1.1k)
Twitter followers up by around 100 (reached 1.7k)
LinkedIn followers up by around 100 (reached 1k)
New OpenCollective contributor, Apideck + additional 100 USD every month

Forecast? Last months were as awesome as March, usually +100. Does it mean that we will have +1k members on all channels by the end of the year? 😅

Figure 1: Comparison of Q1 2020 vs Q1 2021 visits to asyncapi.com

Let's scale this party up!

AsyncAPI at Linux Foundation

We did it. AsyncAPI initiative joined Linux Foundation (LF). No more excuses for you not to join us. You're all welcome.

I don't want to write about this too much as everything was described in different articles about us joining LF:

FAQ

Let me provide more context in FAQ style:

Is Linux Foundation taking control over AsyncAPI

No. AsyncAPI Initiative runs under open governance model and is community-driven. LF assures the project's intellectual property (IP), and related assets do not belong to any company or individual. Fran Mendez does not retire. He only handed over rights to the project to the foundation to assure the community that it is completely safe for all to use the spec and its tooling.

It also means our GitHub organization is not going anywhere. Nothing changes.

Do we need to sign some CLA now to contribute

We do not need a contributor license agreement (CLA) on repositories for our tools. We might need to set up EasyCLA for the repository where we have the specification. We need to clarify it in the long run—nothing to worry about until we set it up. In the end, the only reason to set it up is to secure the community from a situation that some contributor (or their company) claims rights to some part of the specification they contributed to.

How much money you need

Glad you asked. We joined the foundation with an open governance model that favors active contributors over sponsors. As a result, we do not have a setup where we can assure significant income in exchange for voting rights. In other words, we do not have a financial founding associated with joining the foundation. We still need your financial support. Go to our Open Collective profile and drop some coins. Let us know if I can help to preach about AsyncAPI in your company for some extra money.

How can we help

Except for regular contributions, we need help setting up tooling for our open governance model. We need to:

Automate a process of collecting information about TSC members
Put information about current TSC members on the AsyncAPI website
Figure out tooling for the website
Setup CODEOWNERS and VOTING files in all the repositories

Everyone with a different set of skills is welcome. Just contact me.

What is next

We are almost ready for the next releases of the specification. We already have a new, GraphQL-inspired contribution guide that explains how to introduce changes in the specification. What is left is a decision on how actually to decide that release will happen and when. Help us by:

Familiarize with instruction on how to introduce changes in the spec, pick the idea that you want to champion, and let us start improving the spec
Have a look at the proposal on release cadence and share your opinion, as comments or emojis

Vision and roadmap

AsyncAPI creator, Fran Mendez, published AsyncAPI Initiative's vision and roadmap for next years.

tl;dr
AsyncAPI becomes the #1 API specification for defining and developing APIs. Any kind of APIs.

Go to the roadmap view to check out what it means and what needs to be done to get there.

We need a lot of help to complete this roadmap. Without engagement and support of the community, all of this is just wishful thinking. All hands aboard, we're waiting here.

Google Summer of Code

In 2020, we decided to actively support the Hacktoberfest to give back to the community by making it easier to make a first contribution in open-source and at the same time improve awareness about the AsyncAPI Initiative. We received a very positive feedback, and people referred us to Google Summer of Code as a place where our engagement would be highly appreciated.

We applied this year to be part of the GSoC initiative.

We got rejected.

It is not easy to reject us, though 😃

Postman that we partner with was accepted for GSoC and offered us to submit the list with our ideas(ideas 7-13) as part of Postman application. We received many proposals and were contaced by many very motivated students (but not only students) who would like to join the AsyncAPI initiative and build great tools.

Have a look at the list of ideas. We received proposals for all of them. It looks like soon, our tooling ecosystem will get many new useful tools. Stay tuned. Feel free to join us, share your use cases for the ideas and also help build those tools. A Majority of discussions happen here.

Bindings rendering in react component

Thanks to work done by Swen Helge from Solace, the React component supports rendering of information provided in bindings. Check release 0.21 in the playground for the React component.

Messages validation in NodeJS template

Thanks to work done by Khuda Dad Nomani, the NodeJS template that you can generate using the AsyncAPI Generator includes a message validator that enables real-time validation of all incoming and outgoing messages. Check out this short instructions to see it in action or watch the below recording.

About AsyncAPI in different languages

Are you tired of reading about AsyncAPI only in English? Some articles in French and Spanish were released recently, have a look:

If you want to see more content in different languages, let us know.

Also, provide feedback to Barbaño González that works on content for Spanish-speaking audience. Some help needed here.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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