Mike Ralphson Joins Postman to Lead Our OpenAPI Strategy
Postman is excited to announce the expansion of our Postman Open Technologies team of renowned experts. Building on the addition of Fran Méndez and Lukas Gornicki from the AsyncAPI team, as well as Ben Hutton from the JSON Schema community, we’d now like to introduce Mike Ralphson as Postman’s OpenAPI Specification (OAS) lead.
OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, and JSON Schema are cornerstones of the API lifecycle and governance for enterprise organizations. At Postman, we are keen to assemble a powerhouse team that doesn’t just speak to each of these specifications, but actually leads the API conversation around them. Mike Ralphson does just that when it comes to the OAS.
As we were looking to grow the Postman Open Technologies team, we knew that we needed someone who not only gets the technical details of the OAS—which has become the de facto standard for how you describe the surface area of an API—but who also has hands-on experience working with it on the ground within tooling. Mike first caught our attention for his work as part of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) for the OpenAPI Initiative (OAI), where he helps evolve the specification. But it is the variety of tooling that he has developed, contributed, and adopted that made it clear to us how much he really understands the importance of the OAS.
Beginning with essential tooling for parsing and converting OAS, and then most visibly in his work in the area of API discovery with the OAS discovery on the APIs.guru project, as well as the proposed Schema.org WebAPI component, Mike helps provide the fundamentals for working with the spec and is dedicated to solving one of the biggest pain points for API publishers and consumers—API discovery.
Mike stepped in to help manage the APIs.guru OpenAPI Directory, which boasts 2,204 API descriptions with a collective 74,952 individual API endpoints available, making it the largest directory of OAS definitions online today. The directory isn’t just a repo of OAS files for a variety of APIs, it is a high-quality open source project that enhances and validates the specifications as they are discovered or contributed to the project, regularly checking for updates, and making sure the directory reflects the latest and greatest for many of the leading APIs out there today. APIs.guru has significantly contributed to the public API discovery conversation. Mike has gone even further by helping define and gain adoption for the Schema.org WebAPI object, which provides a standardized way for defining a machine-readable index of an API, further standardizing the API discovery conversation in a way that will have a massive impact across web and API search services and tooling.
His range of work shows that he doesn’t just have blinders on when it comes to focusing only on the OAS, but that he sees the bigger picture; he truly understands the role that API search and discovery plays in the overall API lifecycle. And though he’s still settling in as the newest member of the Postman Open Technologies team, Mike has already started fleshing out an ambitious list of OAS-related projects (and continue his TSC duties as part of the OAI).
As we welcome Mike as a new member of the Postman team, we also want to let the Postman community know that we now have an expert available to help answer your burning questions about OpenAPI—all while he informs the Postman roadmap when it comes to how the OAS is being put to work across the API landscape. Having Mike on board dramatically increases the ways Postman will support the OAS as part of our OAI membership, and we hope we can help it have greater reach in defining the API lifecycle across every industry being transformed by APIs today.
OpenAPI is not just central to the Postman API Platform; it is central to our 17 million developers who are working hard to publish more meaningful and useful APIs, as well as rapidly consume and integrate with APIs as part of their desktop, web, mobile, and device applications. We are proud to have Mike help us all in our API journey to better leverage the OAS as a central source of truth when it comes to enterprise API operations.
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