Im joining Postman, focusing on Open Source

Well the unexpected happened!

I joined Postman to focus on Open Source technologies.

(I've been informed this makes me a Postmanaut .)

What is the new job about?

Being hired onto the Open Source (OSS) side of the Postman spaceship means I was not hired to work on the Postman product docs. (So joining Postman all-hands meetings or events are not required, cause Im in one of the partner OSS teams.)

Rather, I was hired directly by the OSS project maintainer team that owns the AsyncAPI OSS initiative, which moved under the Linux Foundation.

If you're curious to learn more, Postmans CEO and co-founder Abhinav Asthana wrote a blog post in 2020 to announce their partnership with AsyncAPI.

My job here as Senior Technical Writer will be to own the documentation for AsyncAPI.

That said, Ill delve in a few streams or conference talks as well, despite not being their DevRel person. New boss just happened to suggest the idea and I decided to remain open to it since it would be only OSS community focused events. (Ive been taking a purposeful break from corporate/startup conference talks for over a year because I needed and wanted a damn break.)

Thank you for the neat swag, Postman!

But...I'm also awaiting my AsyncAPI swag to arrive soon!

Wait, does Postman offer any cool benefits?

Ooh you bet they do!

• $240/month lunch stipend: ergo, FREE lunch for as long as I work here

• Up to $600/year reimbursed for wellness and health programs; Im using mine for kickboxing

• Asynchronous communication via Slack

• Remote WFH

• Very flexible schedule

• Unlimited PTO

• Full medical benefits/401K account; they hope to start matching this year or next

• Charity/Foundation donation matching for an organization of your choice ; I will be choosing Women for Afghan Women, because we need to continue supporting Afghan Women during the current humanitarian crisis unrolling in Afghanistan this year.

What is AsyncAPI?

AsyncAPI is an OSS initiative that seeks to improve Event-Driven Architectures (EDAs), asynchronous API standardization, and asynchronous API developer tools.

AsyncAPI was created to describe APIs that dont use HTTP. AsyncAPI has a specification similar to OpenAPI: it uses JSON schema for modeling published and subscribed objects.

EDAs like AsyncAPI are broker-centric. A broker is a piece of infrastructure in charge of receiving messages and delivering them. Brokers can store messages until they are delivered, making EDAs quite resilient to failures. Some examples of brokers are RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka, Solace, etc.

Wanna try an AsyncAPI playground?
https://playground.asyncapi.io

asyncapi: '2.1.0'info:  title: Count Signups  version: 1.0.0  description: This service counts user signupschannels:  user/signedup:    subscribe:      message:        $ref: '#/components/messages/UserSignedUp'components:  messages:    UserSignedUp:      payload:        type: object        properties:          displayName:            type: string            description: user name          email:            type: string            format: email            description: user email

Why am I excited about joining a % OSS team?

Honestly, I am most excited about not having a Product Owner that feels pressured by an Engineering organization.

Why?

• Its been my experience that when Product Managers (PMs) or Engineering orgs own Technical Writer (TW) teams, Developer Documentation often suffers by getting caught between the conflicting priorities of opposite teams.

• Engineering orgs tend to assume dev audiences know at least some basics. (For the love of donuts ... can we stop assuming what readers do or dont know, have or havent installed, and have or haven't tested before?!?!)

• Engineering orgs tend to be arrogant in their programming knowledge and not place enough value on detailed and beginner guides.

• Engineering orgs tend to forget that DevDocs need to make sense to non-programmers. (i.e. Not all PMs know how to program and not all readers are developers. I mean, do you want your Sales team empowered for success or dont you?)

• PMs tend to be too opinionated on voice, which consistently leads to stifling a tech writers individual style.

• PMs can also focus too much on feature driven development that brings in more business vs prioritizing what the actual community freaking asked for.

• PMs can lose perspective and forget that documentation should help ANYONE. That includes developers whose first language is not English. Forcing TWs who learnt English as their second language to magically write only in mind for USA audiences or English grammar enthusiasts is the opposite of inclusion and diversity. PMs need to understand that its a balancing act to tackle DevDocs and that keeping it simple to read matters!

• Having TW teams report into PM (or Engineering) orgs removes true ownership from TWs. TW teams need to have sole jurisdiction to do the job right. As long as TWs are reporting to another department, Developer Documentation goals will always be in competition with the parent org.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Whats next?

Im available for blog posts, articles, workshops, videos, and talks about AsyncAPI, the AsyncAPI community, and how you too can contribute to AsyncAPI.

My main focus is writing our Docs, but new boss supports variety, so Im open to it.

I'll also make a point to help with community questions that come through our AsyncAPI Slack channel.

Lastly, we hold biweekly OSS AsyncAPI interest community meetings on Tuesdays at 6:00pm CET. If you'd like to join me, all you have to do is add our calendar or join our mailing list to get an invite to the next meeting.

Let me know how I can help!

If you already have some AsyncAPI questions to send my way, I'm only a DM away here and in my social media.

I can't wait to meet and support all of you awesome OSS community members!