Ben Hutton Joins Postman to Lead Our JSON Schema Strategy

Postman is excited to announce that we are further expanding our team of open source API specification talent. After joining the OpenAPI Initiative last year and then partnering with AsyncAPI’s Fran Méndez and Lukasz Gornicki, we are now bringing on Ben Hutton, a renowned leader in the JSON Schema community.

Ben will join Postman as our JSON Schema specification lead to help advance the specification and support the community. He’ll also be the Postman ambassador for everything JSON Schema when it comes to internal, partner, customer, and public conversations. Ben brings a wealth of experience around JSON Schema, including how it is put to use in a variety of tooling.

JSON Schema today

JSON Schema is a vocabulary that allows you to annotate and validate JSON documents, and it has become central to both the OpenAPI and AsyncAPI specifications. It has also become the de facto way to define the objects passed along with each API request, received as part of the API response, or published and subscribed to for event-driven APIs—establishing JSON Schema as an essential ingredient in all API operations today.

The December 2020 version of JSON Schema (draft 2020-12) was just released, but it is already in heavy rotation within every enterprise organization around the globe. While the JSON Schema road map remains left up to the JSON Schema community, we are very interested in working with Ben to identify the other areas where Postman can support JSON Schema through our web, social, Slack, Github, and wider online presence.

As with Postman’s AsyncAPI partnership, bringing Ben onto the team won’t mean that Postman controls the direction of JSON Schema. It just means that Ben has the resources and support he needs to continue leading effectively within the JSON Schema community. It means that Postman has the in-house JSON Schema expertise we need to define our road map properly.

Supporting the future of open API specifications

Further supporting JSON Schema completes the puzzle for Postman when it comes to the API lifecycle cornerstones of OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, and JSON Schema. It is vital that all three are not just stable and exist as evolving specifications, but that they do so in concert. Both OpenAPI and AsyncAPI have adopted JSON Schema as the modeling and validation for any web, event, or message-driven API defined with these specifications, leaving all three specifications very dependent on each other.

Postman is thrilled to be stepping up our involvement in all three of these open API specification communities. We will continue to help align the JSON Schema community with the AsyncAPI and OpenAPI communities—and we will reach out to our industry partners to help build the foundation we all need to power the coming decades of growth in the global API ecosystem. By making sure the API lifecycle and our API operations are more standardized, machine-readable, and open-sourced, the world’s API developers can build upon and remix each other’s work in a way that collectively moves us all forward together.

What’s next

When it comes to how API specifications are powering the “API factory floor” in coming years, Postman is shifting into high gear. We’re incredibly proud to have Ben joining us in this journey, and we’ll be working with him to help guide both our support of the JSON Schema and the Postman road map itself.

I am personally looking forward to working with Ben to help further define his role at Postman based upon the needs of the API community. To learn more about how Ben himself sees this exciting partnership, read his blog post in which he shares his thoughts on joining Postman.