Announcing Postman’s projects and accepted contributors for Google Summer of Code 2023

In March, we announced that Postman was returning as a mentoring organization at Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and we put out a call for contributors to join us. We received an overwhelming response from people across the world, and after weeks of reviewing proposals, we have finally selected an incredibly talented pool of contributors to work with us on projects that focus on open source API technologies.

We are thrilled to announce that we have been allocated nine slot requests this year, and we will be working with accepted contributors for a happy summer of coding. Without further ado, we are delighted to introduce our accepted contributors and nine projects for GSoC 2023. To the chosen participants, we are excited to have you on board and look forward to working with you over the next few months. We believe that this program will be a great learning experience for all of us, and we can’t wait to see how these projects will help scale open source API specifications across the API-first world.

AsyncAPI Initiative projects

The AsyncAPI Initiative is an open source project and a part of the Linux Foundation. It maintains the AsyncAPI Specification that is used for describing asynchronous APIs, and it also builds tooling to support event-driven architectures. This year, we will work on the following four projects under the AsyncAPI category:

Automate listing of members of the technical steering committee

The AsyncAPI community follows an open governance model and has introduced a technical steering committee (TSC), which consists of all the code owners who want to use their right to have a vote in the TSC decision-making process. The idea of this project is to develop a GitHub action (or a bot) that will read VOTERS files from all repos, maintain a single list, and put it on the website.

• Accepted contributor: Richa Sharma
• Mentors: Saurav Kumar, Lukasz Gornicki, Khuda Dad Nomani
• GitHub repository

Introduce UI tests and refactoring for the AsyncAPI website

The current codebase of the AsyncAPI website doesn’t contain any UI tests, which makes it hard to maintain consistency. The idea of this project is to write automation tests that will run at the PR level and check the overall build and codebase of the changes made in the PR. The project also involves refactoring some parts of the code to make it unit-testable and reusable across the codebase.

• Accepted contributor: Aadrika Bhargava
• Mentors: Akshat Nema, Abir Pal
• GitHub repository

Add “Autofix” feature for common linting errors (with Spectral)

AsyncAPI Preview is a VSCode extension for viewing AsyncAPI documents inside VSCode, and Spectral for VSCode provides inline and listed linting errors for common and even custom mistakes. This project is all about providing auto-fix refactoring for the most common and standard spectral linting errors for AsyncAPI.

• Accepted contributor: Savio Dias
• Mentors: Iván García Sainz-Aja
• GitHub repository

Authentication layer for Glee with support for multiple authentication frameworks

Glee is an innovative spec-first framework that empowers developers to build high-performing server-side applications with ease. By allowing users to focus on the business logic of their applications, Glee takes care of the critical aspects of performance, scalability, and resilience, making it an ideal solution for complex production environments. As of now, Glee supports multiple protocols like Websocket, MQTT, Kafka, and support for HTTP is coming soon. The idea of this project is to implement support for multiple authentication and authorization processes.

• Accepted contributor: Alexander Godwin Ereremena
• Mentors: Souvik De, Khuda Dad Nomani
• GitHub repository

OpenAPI Initiative projects

The OpenAPI Initiative, also part of the Linux Foundation, is focused on creating and evolving OpenAPI—a community-driven specification that describes RESTful APIs in a machine-readable manner. Postman is a part of the OpenAPI Initiative and invests in building open source tooling around it. We aim to build the following two projects under the OpenAPI category this year:

OpenAPI Web Search

The OpenAPI Web Search (OAWS) project is all about building a search engine for finding Swagger and OpenAPI definitions on the open web—mostly from lesser-known sources. OAWS indexes APIs from various public sources and makes them searchable by keyword, provider, and other metadata. This project will let you say “goodbye” to the frustration of sifting through endless documentation—and say “hello” to a streamlined experience for finding APIs that support your use cases.

Eventually, the dataset powering OAWS will be able to be used to analyze the specifications to obtain insights into some common API practices. Learn more about OAWS here.

• Accepted contributor: Priyanshu Sharma
• Mentors: Vinit Shahdeo, Himanshu Sharma, Harshil Jain
• GitHub repository

GitHub OpenAPI search

GitHub is home to more than 100 million developers who share source code, API interfaces, API definitions, and much more. We’ll work on providing a robust way to crawl public GitHub repositories for machine-readable API definitions.

• Accepted contributor: Ishaan Shah
• Mentors: Mike Ralphson, Anshul Jain
• GitHub repository

JSON Schema projects

JSON Schema is an open source specification that enables the confident and reliable use of the JSON data format with the help of an active and growing community. This year, we’ll support JSON Schema tooling with the following two projects:

Bowtie and the world of JSON Schema

Bowtie is a new tool that validates the conformance of various JSON Schema tools with the specification by running them against a set of known correct test cases. It also regularly renders the results of these tests to a web page. The idea of this project is to enhance (or replace) Bowtie’s current, simplistic UI.

• Accepted contributor: Agnivesh Chaubey
• Mentors: Benjamin Granados, Julian Berman, and Pranav Singhal
• GitHub repository

Data transformation utilities using JSON Schema

JSON Schema is designed for validation, but the information in a schema can be used for a number of other purposes, as well. One of those purposes is data transformation. This project aims to implement some of the transformation use cases that the JSON Schema community has been asking about for the last few months.

• Accepted contributor: Francielle Dellamora
• Mentors: Benjamin Granados, Jaon Desrosiers, Argo Saha
• GitHub organization

Schema.org OpenAPI catalog project

Schema.org is a collaborative community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond. We’ll be creating an open catalog of OpenAPI definitions for each of the Schema.org objects that will provide a robust set of starting OpenAPI templates for teaching or developing new APIs using a design-first approach. This project will not only help save developer’s time when it comes to creating new APIs, but will also help ensure that APIs are developed according to common standards and are as interoperable as possible.

• Accepted contributor: Pragya Bhardwaj
• Mentors: Mike Ralphson, ​​Sourabh Bagrecha, Sai Alekhya Yerragunta
• GitHub repository

Looking ahead

We want to extend a huge “thank you” to everyone who submitted proposals this year. We were impressed by the quality of the submissions and humbled by the level of interest in contributing to these valuable open source projects and Postman’s future. We encourage you to keep an eye out for open issues on our repositories—and make your mark by contributing.

For our accepted contributors, we’re excited to start the 12-week program and work with you to bring your proposals to life. The project admins will invite you to their respective community channels to get your GSoC journey started with us. You’ll be paired with experienced mentors from our team who will guide and support you throughout the program. We’ll also provide resources, tools, and a vibrant community to help you succeed.

Once again, congratulations to all accepted contributors. We can’t wait to see the incredible contributions you’ll make to the API-first world—and eventually, to Postman! For any questions or concerns, please reach out to us at gsoc@postman.com.