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 I’m 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, Postman’s 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, I’ll 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. (I’ve 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; I’m using mine for kickboxing
Up to $100/month for Internet bill
Up to $200/year for Learning & Development (L&D) books 📚: applies to job-related, L&D literature of your choosing
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 don’t 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 signups
channels:
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?
It’s 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 don’t know, have or haven’t 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 don’t you?)
PMs tend to be too opinionated on voice, which consistently leads to stifling a tech writer’s 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 it’s 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.🎤
What’s next?
I’m 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 I’m open to it.😃👍🏽
I'll also make a point to help with community questions that come through our AsyncAPI Slack channel.
Lastly, we host and record community interest meetings bi-weekly on Tuesdays. Meetings rotate from 4:00pm UTC one Tuesday and then 8:00am UTC the next Tuesday. Rotating the time of our bi-community meetings allows us to meet with community members from APAC, Europe and Americas. 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!
Top comments (7)
Congratulations @alejandra_quetzalli !
Looking forward to see if we could collaborate on something related to AsyncAPI :)
For sure, what are you curious to try out?
To start with, I'm thinking of doing a talk on OAS vs AsyncAPI!
Awesome! Let me know if you run into any questions and I'll do my best to find a detailed answer :D
Congratulations! I had the pleasure of interviewing Abhinav Asthana a few times on my Techgenix podcast. I remember how friendly he was and the team seems great!
:D thank you! I will be working on the OSS team and I'm already happy 😊 about my choice
TQM amiga! Muchas felicidades!!