Starting a new open-source project

15 May 2018

Working on open-source is a skill…​

Three month ago I started to use and to contribute swagger-codegen. It feelt natural to fix and to add the stuff I needed there.

Then I received an invitation from a group of people that had started a fork of the project. Without going into the details, I think that each member had its own reasons to work on this fork. We wrote a summary in the project Q&A.

Enable project specific settings
Image 1. OpenAPI Generator logo proposition by @jimschubert

The last days were really exiting, we have started the openapi-generator project officially. We have now a GitHub repository: OpenAPITools/openapi-generator The first feedback arrives. We have pushed our first SNAPSHOT artifacts on sonatype central repository. We are close to our first release…​

Running an open-source project

I realised during this experiment that participating in an open-source project and running it is really a skill. Some people have it, they are directly alined, they understand what they need to do. Other do not understand how it works.

I have learned it from talented people. All developers involved with projects hosted at the Eclipse Foundation and contributors of the Asciidoctor project have shown me the way. They were excellent teachers.

What is next for OpenAPI Generator?

Starting an open source project is not only about code. Communication and marketing are also important. I hope we will manage build a community of user around our project. This is the best way to find potential contributors.

About OpenAPI Generator:

If you wonder what the project is about, here my short definition:

An OpenAPI Specification (OAS) is a great way to describe API in a standardised, machine readable and programming language-agnostic manner. OpenAPI Generator is an engine to generate documentation, API clients and server stubs in different languages for a given OpenAPI Specification.

Post source on GitHub