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Alejandra Quetzalli ๐Ÿพ
Alejandra Quetzalli ๐Ÿพ

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I joined Postman, focusing on Open Source ๐Ÿ‘ฉ๐Ÿผโ€๐Ÿš€

Wellโ€ฆ the unexpected happened!

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I joined Postman to focus on Open Source technologies.

(I've been informed this makes me a Postmanaut ๐Ÿ‘ฉ๐Ÿผโ€๐Ÿš€.)

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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 Iโ€™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, Postmanโ€™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, Iโ€™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. (Iโ€™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!

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

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Wait, does Postman offer any cool benefits?

Ooh you bet they do! ๐Ÿš€๐Ÿ‘ฉ๐Ÿผโ€๐Ÿš€

  • $240/month lunch stipend: ergo, FREE lunch for as long as I work here ๐Ÿ˜œ๐Ÿ•๐Ÿ•

  • Up to $600/year reimbursed for wellness and health programs; Iโ€™m using mine for kickboxing

  • Up to $100/month for Internet bill

  • Up to $200/year for Learning & Development (L&D) books ๐Ÿ“š: 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 ๐Ÿคž๐Ÿฝ

  • Charity/Foundation donation matching for an organization of your choice ๐Ÿฅฐ; 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 donโ€™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

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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
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Why am I excited about joining a ๐Ÿ’ฏ% OSS team?

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

Why?

  • Itโ€™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 ๐Ÿฉ ๐Ÿฉ ๐Ÿฉ... can we stop assuming what readers do or donโ€™t know, have or havenโ€™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 donโ€™t you?)

  • PMs tend to be too opinionated on voice, which consistently leads to stifling a tech writerโ€™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 โœจโœจ magically โœจโœจ write only in mind for USA audiences or English grammar enthusiasts is the opposite of inclusion and diversity. PMs need to understand that itโ€™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.๐ŸŽค

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Whatโ€™s next?

Iโ€™m available for blog posts, articles, workshops, videos, and talks about AsyncAPI, the AsyncAPI community, and how you too can contribute to AsyncAPI.โ™ฅ๏ธ

My main focus is writing our Docs, but new boss supports variety, so Iโ€™m open to it.๐Ÿ˜ƒ๐Ÿ‘๐Ÿฝ

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.

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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!

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Top comments (7)

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aravind profile image
Aravind Putrevu

Congratulations @alejandra_quetzalli !

Looking forward to see if we could collaborate on something related to AsyncAPI :)

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alejandra_quetzalli profile image
Alejandra Quetzalli ๐Ÿพ

For sure, what are you curious to try out?

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aravind profile image
Aravind Putrevu

To start with, I'm thinking of doing a talk on OAS vs AsyncAPI!

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alejandra_quetzalli profile image
Alejandra Quetzalli ๐Ÿพ

Awesome! Let me know if you run into any questions and I'll do my best to find a detailed answer :D

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billraymond profile image
Bill Raymond

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!

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alejandra_quetzalli profile image
Alejandra Quetzalli ๐Ÿพ

:D thank you! I will be working on the OSS team and I'm already happy ๐Ÿ˜Š about my choice

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devpato profile image
Pato

TQM amiga! Muchas felicidades!!