#TechnicalWriting#APIs#APIDocumentation#AsynchronousAPIs#AsyncAPI#EventDrivenAPIs#ApacheAvro#JSON: "Luckily there's a specification similar to OpenAPI but directed at defining event-driven APIs. I'm talking about AsyncAPI. It's a specification that lets you define an API that's asynchronous in nature. By using AsyncAPI you can define, among other things, the different topics where events will be dropped, and the shape of the messages that represent each topic.
And this is where things get interesting. The shape of messages or, in other words, its payload, can adhere to specific standards. Without messages, there's no way to communicate events. And, following standards helps to guarantee the correct publishing, transport, and consumption of messages. If messages don't follow any standards, it's hard for developers to understand the shape of the messages. In addition, it's easy for consumers to stop working because, suddenly, messages are being shared in a slightly different format.
Among different message standards, there's one particularly interesting to me. Apache Avro isn't just a theoretical standard. It's also a serialization format. You can say it's a competitor to JSON but specialized in working with event-driven APIs. In the same way you can use JSON Schema to define the shape of JSON data you have Avro Schema to help you specify what Avro message payloads look like."