Robin Ginn, Linux Foundation

Thank you for tuning in to today’s TLDR episode of the Breaking Changes podcast. I’m your host and chief evangelist for Postman, Kin Lane. With Breaking Changes, we explore topics from the world of APIs, but look at it through the lens of business and engineering leadership. Joining me today, we have Robin Ginn, executive director at the OpenJS Foundation. Robin stopped by to share more about the importance of the OpenJS Foundation, open source policy and how it applies across the API lifecycle, exploring the value delivered by the Linux Foundation and its subgroups. I like to start simple, start with the basics: who are you and what do you do?

Great. I’m Robin Bender Ginn, I’m executive director of the OpenJS Foundation. We are an independent foundation hosted at the Linux Foundation, and we are the home for JavaScript and related web technologies.

So why is OpenJS needed, why is it important?

Well, I mean, we all care about the internet, of course, and having a stable and secure, reliable internet infrastructure is very important. And most people may be surprised to learn that 98% of the world’s websites use JavaScript. So you’re using JavaScript whether you know it or not. And some of our projects, Node.js, jQuery, Dojo, Electron, NativeScript, AMP, if one of those goes down, gosh, more than likely your website may go down, your cloud may go down. So we take our responsibility seriously in keeping the internet solid and reliable.

Yeah, I feel like it’s the same for me with APIs. I’m like, people don’t always care about APIs as much as I do, and I’m like, but they’re beneath everything, your entire life depends on it. And they’re like, don’t be so dramatic. And I’m like, well, it’s true, you should care about these things at least somewhat. And to date, I’m still the only one that’s obsessed about APIs.

I feel the same way. People take JavaScript for granted. It’s been around 26 years, the web just had, I think, its 33rd birthday. But we celebrate those things because it’s really the people who keep it running, and if you don’t have a strong community keeping these things together, then things do fall apart. That doesn’t mean that there’s not constant innovation. So that’s kind of the cool thing about JavaScript, is performance and everything gets better all of the time with new technologies, but our legacy technologies are also important and widely used, because sometimes you don’t need a newfangled thing, you just need something that works for you.

Yes, and so much of the internet I think we take for granted is about that just silent things working that make things go around today. So before we get into those mechanisms, the technical and the political, legal ones, how did you get here? What’s your background, what brought you to the Linux Foundation and doing what you do?

Yeah, kind of an unconventional path, which I advocate for in technology. You don’t have to be a developer or a coder to get to open source. I kind of grew up as a policy wonk kind of person. I have a journalism degree, so I like to write, and I think writing skills are important for every job. When I was growing up in Seattle, the tech companies were obviously born at that time, and so I had my policy wonk sort of experience, and then moving into technology, as you often do if you are born and raised in Seattle, you go from natural resources, like, and airplanes, to technology. I started out doing privacy and security for about a decade, very much the intersection of how society relies on technology and how important that is. And then Microsoft was looking for an open source communications person back in 2008. Interoperability was very important at that time, it was a key part of the antitrust consent decree, so with my tech policy hat, I was hired on to be the first open source PR person at Microsoft. So I started working with the open source community projects across the board. At that time, I think we had 80 engineering projects, and I sort of became the encyclopedia of open source at Microsoft. It was a great experience watching a company sort of shift and change. But when the Linux Foundation had this opportunity to run OpenJS, I jumped on it, so now I get to work for all of the people, all of the companies and communities who care about open source, so it’s a great place to be.

So cutting your teeth at Microsoft, that’s an interesting road, especially from the open source realm, because I remember the 90s, late 90s, and very rapidly, open source is bad, it’s not something you want to do, and then they realized the business value and the importance of it, and then changed their tune going into this century, and then now leading conversations. So it’s definitely an interesting place to get your feet under you when it comes to open source. But I want to backpedal, because I don’t want to assume my audience understands a policy wonk like you, and I’m a policy wonk as well, like, what do you define as policy? What is it, is it federal, state level, what are you so wonkish about when it comes to policy, and why does policy matter?

I think it’s how, if I think about it, how something impacts society, right? And often you talk about all politics are local, and if you’ve ever taken a look at your state legislators, which maybe people don’t pay attention to quite so much, that may have more of a direct impact in your life than what’s happening in Washington, DC or elsewhere. So if you care about how something impacts your communities, and think about your communities, your family, your neighbors, your network, your school network, your employment network, that all create a better place to live and to work and to learn. So that really always inspired me from a policy perspective. And if you think about, there’s, open source is so many things, it’s not just the code on GitHub, there are a lot of people who care about policies and governing and governance around open source projects, and these are communities as well. And you find that it doesn’t matter if you live with this company or that company or this street or that street, everybody has a common goal to make something better, and those boundaries somewhat disappear, and then you just write, basically it’s almost like a set of rules that are very open and transparent and easy to understand so people can understand how to contribute and make a difference.

Ah, that was pretty concise, and I think went above and beyond what I was trying to get across to listeners, because I’m a classic tech bro, nextbeard, programmer, group, database guy, and I didn’t really, I grew up Pacific Northwest as well, I didn’t really understand policy until I moved to DC and started working in DC, and then I saw the overlap between technology and policy at federal, state, or local levels, or how that drives communities, defines and shapes communities. And I mean, I just thought, well, open source is good and it’s powerful ideologically, thus it can stand on its own feet. I didn’t see everything else that’s needed, starting with money, to make open source actually sustainable. And so I think that’s what I heard you say, is that policy really provides that sustainability and what’s going to matter to our communities, not just our local but our JavaScript community, our Node.js community.

Right. And it’s transparency and essentially fairness. We used to sort of joke, when you sit in Seattle or Redmond, in my case, and you see a lot of development happening in Silicon Valley, you’re not one of the cool kids, right? And we used to think, gosh, okay, we would like to do an open source contribution to WebKit or X, Y, or Z technology, but if there’s not a kind of what we call governance, which is a clear way to operate, a set of rules that’s open and fair to everybody, we’re like, gosh, are we not having beers with the right people in Silicon Valley to make my contribution go through? And so that’s how we operate at the Linux Foundation and OpenJS and many open source projects. They have what you call open governance, it’s open to all, it’s transparent, it’s kind of like a set of rules that make it fair for anybody to contribute.

But how does, I mean, open source has a lot of drive-by activity, people just showing up wanting to contribute, wanting to help, wanting to make a change, and don’t always have time to read the rules or understand the governance. So how does OpenJS deal with that?

It’s a very warm and welcoming group, I would say. For some of our projects, like Node.js, for example, there might be something for a first-time contributor that’s easy to do. There’s often issues that somebody may experience that is really helpful for the project. Maintainers are helpful if you can explain why you want to contribute, what issue you’re having, and here’s how you replicate it, so our project maintainers can know how to address it. But I don’t think you have to be a master in governance to contribute. There’s also, if you look at most of our projects too, they operate in the open, that means they stream all of their meetings, and our meetings live on YouTube, so you can go to the YouTube channel for our projects or for OpenJS and check it out. You’re welcome to be what we love to call lurkers, you’re absolutely welcome to come and just hang out, and if you’re shy, not say a word, but just learn and participate. You learn a lot on our Slack channels, lots of different channels to learn there, our conferences, local community meetups. I think the JavaScript meetup in Seattle often used to have a wait list all of the time, in Seattle, so that was pretty cool.

So what’s the relationship between OpenJS and Linux Foundation, how do the dynamics work?

Yes, we are hosted at the Linux Foundation, and yet we’re independent. So we have a board of directors who govern the foundation, but the Linux Foundation is almost like a foundation of foundations, and it’s almost like foundation as a service. So, for example, from a budget perspective, I don’t have to buy entire teams or hire entire teams of people, I can just pay for a portion of the finance department, the HR department, for the benefits of the event team just when we need our events, operations and marketing and things like that. So it really helps our foundation scale like you would a big business, but do so in a really efficient way.

Yeah, I think those types of resources are really important and goes to that toolbox that I don’t think us open source folks are going to realize that we need down the road. We passionately start a project, we get traction, it matures and grows, more people come in, and we have to start learning all of these things for ourselves. And for me, I’ve been heavily involved in OpenAPI and Swagger, and getting Swagger originally put in and became OpenAPI Specification and the formation of the OpenAPI Initiative, which is a foundation within the Linux Foundation. And so I was running events as part of this early on, on my own, doing it, and it’s a lot of work, but then as soon as we joined OAI, it’s like, you got the LF events team, and they are good, they come in and do all those things that you just haven’t thought of, and it’s got such a much better rhythm to it than I ever could bring to the table, and it’s really beneficial. I highly recommend folks learning more about it.

Absolutely. I had been involved in the Node.js project for about, I don’t know, 12 years, early on at Microsoft before it became a foundation, and it was a Node.js advisory group, and we had a marketing subcommittee, we were doing events and things like that, but once it moved to the Linux Foundation, it just created this professional services model around it with people who get open source and get community, and also bringing in more of the industry around it to support that as well, which is important.

Yeah, and there’s a lot of, I mean, moving back to the legal part of doing open source and expanding people’s knowledge, I think, who are listening to this, is licensing. You think about, I’m licensing code, but there’s so much more to the legal dimensions of what is open source that I’ve learned since joining and being part of the Linux Foundation. So let’s focus on Node.js. Node.js is established. I mean, there’s been several community rifts and things going on that are political, but it’s established, it’s ubiquitous. What sort of shifts or changes or things that are needed from a licensing and from a support standpoint does Node.js still need at this point in time?

Yeah, we have some flexibility with all of our projects on licenses, as long as they have an OSI-approved license. And then you can use either a CLA or a DCO for a contribution license. But a big part of the legal issue that we were thinking about with Node.js was the trademark. When a project joins the foundation or it’s contributed to the foundation, often you donate the IP, which is that trademark. And you wonder, why are trademarks important? Well, a trademark really designates not just the brand and the logo, but it’s like the source code, the legitimate source code, and also it designates that kind of community blessing around it. Now, what had happened with Node.js is, back, it was always a part of Joyent, which was then acquired by Samsung, and as you’ve mentioned, there was a fork, and then with the Node.js that became io.js, but then the communities decided to come back together when they created the Node Foundation. But when they did that, Joyent retained ownership of the trademark, and then the community operated everything else under the foundation. But what Joyent just recently did is they realized that the OpenJS Foundation was just so stable and the community is so stable, they donated the trademark back to OpenJS, and that happened, what, last month. And that, from a practical matter, means that if somebody is doing, for example, training around Node.js, then it’s, they would have to come to us to get permission to use the trademark, and then we could validate that, yes, that’s a credible training organization, or say somebody wants to go raise money on Open Collective for Node.js, you want any money being raised to be sort of part of the direction of the technical steering committee for Node.js. So in addition, it’s more than branding, it’s really that legitimacy of the source code. So the community was quite excited when it came back, because Joyent always really managed the trademark very well, they sat on our board, but it was just nice to sit in a neutral home like OpenJS, so that was pretty cool.

Yeah, I think these are the things a lot of developers and tech folks don’t think about as they’re building these projects and getting traction and growing in scope and scale, and are caught off guard down the road when these rifts happen, or these schisms or separations, that they don’t really grasp the full impact of copyright. It’s not something we think a lot about, and I learned a lot about it when the Oracle v. Google copyright case, I got a crash course on that. But trademark, you’re just not thinking much about that. So that Joyent relationship, how much of your work as a foundation and open source is managing relationships with corporations and trying to balance that open source and commercial aspect?

I’d say the majority of my work is with the community, because if the community is happy, then my board of directors are happy and the foundation is running well. So we try to develop programs that support our communities to help the projects grow, which in turn provides more stability and growth as well. We have a really clear line between paid members, those corporations who sit on our board, and the community. The community, we have an umbrella organization called the Cross Project Council, that’s like a technical oversight committee at some of these other umbrella foundations, and then you have all of your projects, JSON Schema for example, that Postman is supporting, which we really appreciate. And what we do, as an umbrella organization, each project is able to operate very independently, and then we have at the Cross Project Council some key requirements that they operate kind of cross-projects. So think about your code of conduct, or governance, or events, anything else that cuts across that supports everybody. So when you think about how much time do I spend, yes, I think if you’re a paid member and you sit on our board, they help set direction, manage our budgets, things like that. But a lot of those corporations have people working in the projects in the community, that’s obviously why typically they become a member of OpenJS. But there are benefits in being a member, we do spend probably more time with some of those companies, we work on features and case studies. We just featured, for example, our board member from Netflix, and Netflix is using Node.js, and think about the scale at which they do that. They also have people in the community as well, on the technical steering committee, for example, of Node.js. So it kind of goes both ways, on different aspects.

So how do companies get involved in what’s going on at OpenJS? I’m assuming, like you said, Netflix, they have some sort of skin in the game, they’re wanting to influence and be part of this, but how does a company get involved?

Well, as much as I think people would want me to sell memberships right now, I think the best thing a company could do is to allow your developers, employees, or people in marketing, Microsoft allowed me this, who sat in the marketing department, to work on open source during business hours. Most companies are relying on open source, and probably every company is using open source software, it shouldn’t be an after-school activity, right? It should be a core part of your business. If you’re building your business with an open source project, I would encourage companies to allow their employees to work on those projects during business hours. That’s the greatest contribution that you can do as a corporate. You see startups, mid-sized, big companies not all supporting that. So of course we’re funded by our members, and so we like that as well, or through sponsorships at our events, so that all helps us do more as well. And of course, the more members we have, the more programs we can offer to those projects.

Yeah, I think that employee exposure, team exposure to open source, not just technologies but processes, I think puts them on a better career path but also strengthens your internal open source catalog in a way that, I mean, I think Log4j is probably this year’s poster child of this, like how many people didn’t know that Log4j was in their stack before this year. And that was one of the catalysts behind me pushing for JSON Schema to get put into OpenJS. I had spent time at a large enterprise and then several government agencies, and I had asked them, I said, how are you validating your API requests and responses as part of this consulting work? And they said, oh, well, I’d ask, I said, do you use JSON Schema to validate things? They said, no, no, we don’t use JSON Schema, we use Ajv to validate things and we create these config files. And I was like, well, wait, that’s JSON Schema that you’re using. And so they weren’t aware that they were using JSON Schema, and they didn’t really have much knowledge about the open source tool they were using, and this was pretty ubiquitous. So it kind of concerned me that people weren’t seeing JSON Schema, or let alone understanding the role Ajv played in their catalog.

Yeah, and Ajv is also an OpenJS project.

That’s right, yeah, very important one. You’d be surprised, I occasionally get emails from government agencies and procurement asking me a lot of questions, like, we are a commercial proprietary product. So there’s definitely a gap. And I know tech companies are great places to work at and work for, but I would encourage technologists to go work in government as well. I think there’s, it’s quite impressive, there’s a lot of work happening in security in governments and at our foundation as well.

Yeah, I can’t second that enough, it’s life-changing. My time in federal government changed, how do I say it, the Pacific Northwest libertarian, 180 degrees, changed me, how I see the world, how I see people working together or not working together, and so understanding technology at that scale and how it’s being used, I think is something everybody should, you should take time and go work in government and then come back to see, because it’ll change you.

Yeah. Earlier this month I spoke on a panel at South by Southwest, and at the speaker dinner I sat next to a technologist and program manager from the State Department, and she was on a panel with the European Union talking about tech policy. And what’s really cool to hear from them is how the coordination at the global level on policy, and you’re talking cloud and all kinds of things, it’s just so international. So I mean, she could work anywhere in the world, and I think it’s pretty cool that she’s working at the State Department as that EU liaison. So some really great work happening there.

Yeah, you learn so much, it’s not just about the technology, it’s about everything around it and how it serves people. So definitely recommend folks spend time in service doing that. So how was South by Southwest this year, how was that experience?

It was cool. I had never been before, and if you’re not familiar with it, it is a music festival, film festival, and then there’s a tech conference and an education conference. So I had a panel on the tech conference titled “Is the Internet Really Rotting?” And it was really sparked from a cover story in The Atlantic that Jonathan Zittrain wrote, he’s at the Harvard Berkman Center, in Harvard Law, about the decay of the web, a lot on link rot, content drift, and of course content moderation and all of those things. So we had a panel, we had Todd Moore from IBM who is on our board, and Chris Aniszczyk who’s the CTO of the Linux Foundation, and we had a lot of interesting questions from the audience too. But I think that Jonathan at Harvard may have started out more pessimistic, but for us, technology’s very human, right, because we work with open source and we work with folks and standards and we work with companies, people from so many companies, as I mentioned earlier. So I think we convinced him that things are not as dire as maybe predicted. But yeah, his premise is, there is no CEO of the internet, right, there’s no grand librarian, so if no one’s in charge, who’s in charge? Well, as we mentioned earlier, it’s a lot of these loosely knit but openly governed groups of folks working in open source and open standards.

Yeah, well, South by, isn’t it interesting, I’d always thought of it as a music festival until I went, and my wife and partner in crime, she’s in education, so I ended up speaking at a tech event but then went there earlier for the education piece, and the tech is wedged in between education and music. And so I spent the whole time there, and it was an eye-opening experience to see how educators and librarians see technology. I found that very educational as well. And then just the diverse tech folks that descend on South by, it’s not your usual Silicon Valley crowd, like you said, State Department, European Commission stuff like that.

Yeah, academics, creative folks from all industries, and I spend most of my time with developers, so it was a good reminder of how technology touches everyone. But yeah, I missed the music. They have the tech on the front end of the conference and music on the back end. But I did see Lizzo give a chance to not sing, and of course she’s all about self-love and body positivity, so goosebump moments watching Lizzo, for sure, talk, very empowering.

Yeah, I’m guessing she can really get a crowd going and then get people behind her, that’s great.

Yeah, she didn’t sing, but yeah. And you know, as you know, for me, I’ve been around for a long time, a woman in tech, it wasn’t really easy back then, it’s getting a little bit better, but you still have sexism, you have ageism, all kinds of things. So it is empowering to have people like Lizzo, or people like all women I’ve worked for over the years, kind of inspire you and give you that confidence boost that you need, that pep talk.

Yeah, we need more of that in open source, I mean, tech in general, but I would love, I know we’re working hard at that as part of the OpenAPI Initiative and the AsyncAPI conference, or wait, no, the API Specifications Conference, sorry, too many acronyms floating around in my head sometimes. The API Specifications Conference, we’re really working hard on that mix of speakers and sticking hard to having a diverse set of voices on stage. And so I think, always looking for interesting ways of letting women know, globally, that there’s a space for them in the open source community, and we need them helping define what’s going on, despite, as you know, some of the technical steering committees are heavily male-dominated, like we need to find ways to get more women involved, because it’s critical.

Yeah, I used to like to tell people I was an open source contributor, and they’d look at me, they’d go, like, really, you sit in marketing, like, what? And I, you know, sort of had that self-doubt too. But I remember, it was 2017, I was at the Linux Foundation summit conference, and Linus Torvalds was doing his Q&A with Dirk that he often does, and he said something that really struck me. He said, you know, at the end of the day it’s users that really matter for an open source project, because without users you’re nowhere. So it’s the QA, it’s the documentation, it’s everything that drives adoption. I was like, hey, I do that. And if that’s, and that was really for me, I mean, it took a long time, even though I had been blogging for years about open source technologies, but you have that imposter syndrome if you don’t code, that you’re not really a contributor. So everybody can be a contributor.

Yeah, so was it that mix of storytelling and validation from others in the space, what pushes you over that line where you realize, it’s like that line between where you see traffic on the road and you’re like, oh wait, I’m traffic. So what’s that line that you reached? Was it just naturally got there, or?

I mean, him saying that, that was July, I had worked on open source since 2008, so this is what, probably nine years later, it took me a long time. But there’s still people who perpetuate that concept, even women. I heard somebody say, I was born in the wrong decade, where, you know, and you could have said the same thing about me, I was really great at science and math, but I went into journalism, so if I was born decades later, maybe someone would say, hey, STEM program, let’s go do tech. But it’s okay, because tech needs writers and they need creative people, and they need lawyers, as we talked about, they need community organizers, all of those things don’t involve coding. Like Linus Torvalds said, it’s the users that really matter.

So yes, previous episodes I just finished recording, University of North Carolina, teaching lawyers about APIs and giving them the tech chops they need, and these aren’t just lawyers who are going to be working on tech policy, this is just, as a lawyer, what you need to get information. And then yesterday I did, Pia from the Open Collective, she joined me, and she was awesome, talked, and she’s talking about the intersection of open source, the money side, the legal side, but then social justice and taking care of people, and how their mechanisms have gone from supporting open source to, they’ve given $1.2 million in $1,000 increments to Ukrainians to survive and keep them going, and how they’ve turned that machine in this direction in the last couple weeks. I found that very interesting.

Yeah, and we see, in addition to Ukraine, we’ve seen issues happening in Texas, for example, and unfortunately rolling out across states, that are highly discriminatory against groups of people. And so I was sort of proud to sign a letter with Jim Zemlin and Chris Aniszczyk at the Linux Foundation calling to stop discrimination, not only just in Texas but other states across the country, and we signed on to the Human Rights Campaign as well. And we’re hosting our event in Texas, and some folks, this is in June, and some folks understandably are not comfortable traveling to Texas, so we’re creating more opportunities for virtual participation, but we did feel it was really important to use our voice as the OpenJS Foundation, as a Linux Foundation, to say, hey, this is just not okay, we need to stop, roll those back.

Do you feel like that’s the next frontier of, I mean, I haven’t stopped to think about this too deeply, so excuse me, but it feels like we’re on several waves, if I had to put a version on it, version three or four. We had the original Linus, Linux, and then GitHub, and now, do you feel like this kind of intersection with social justice and advocacy is part of the future DNA of open source tech?

Well, I think so. If I think about our mission, our mission is healthy communities, right, to drive an open and healthy web. And I think one of my former board members, Miles, said, you know, APIs can get deprecated, people don’t.

Yes.

So, and some people say, oh, you should stay out of politics, well, human rights have become political, unfortunately, so where do you draw the line? Yeah. So, and it is amazing, if you want to advocate for inclusive communities, diverse communities, and in doing so drive that culture and using your voice globally, I think is really important.

Yeah, agreed. And I think that open source, I mean, well, first off, APIs, I don’t love APIs as much as I put on as part of the performance. APIs are a vehicle for me to get engaged in interesting conversations and travel around the world and talk to European Commission and do interesting things. And so APIs are totally disposable and should be deprecated, they’re not what matters. But don’t tell all my followers and fans that. But I really feel like, the open source, the role that tech plays, the licensing, the policy, that’s why I think your policy wonkishness is compelling, and I encourage other folks, if they’re policy wonks like, come get involved in open source, come get involved in tech, because it’s behind everything, every industry, every sector, it’s influencing every aspect of our lives, and without folks defending this space, it’s not as open and not as inclusive, and it’s still going to be powering all of these political issues that you hear about. Tech, technology is very political, whether people want us to be quiet or not.

Yeah, and we are global, right, we are everywhere. So, but you do want to take your progressive norms and spread that globally. So I mean, I think you do see that in probably every country, unfortunately their governments may not operate that way, so hopefully we can be a good, strong, positive voice in that.

Yeah. How has COVID changed your reality as far as what you do running OpenJS?

You know, OpenJS, and even the Linux Foundation, was remote before COVID. Of course, our conferences went virtual, but because we come from so many different countries, companies, and walks of life, we’ve always been virtual. But for me, it kept me going, we have Tuesday community calls, you should check out, we have a public calendar, we kind of have a lot of fun. Some people hate meetings, well, you would love our meetings, because we always have a lot of fun. So I think it made us even more, it made us stronger, I think, because we were sort of used to that. But because of it, it really did become that cross-industry bright spot. Of course, we missed our events, and so June will be pretty great. I’ve been learning over the years that the JavaScripters love their karaoke, they’re sort of infamous for these all-nighters, so we’re going to have Texas live-band karaoke at our conference in June. I have gone to a couple of in-person conferences since things have started to open up, and it’s pretty special to go face-to-face again, for sure.

Yeah, my team, I run developer relations for Postman, that’s one of the programs I run in addition to the open tech stuff, and I started sending DevRel folks to their first events, and they were just jazzed, and it was like, all right, we’re back, and that human interaction, human connection was very needed. I mean, we’re still being very safe and cautious and thoughtful, but it’s a big part of what we do, it’s how we make this human, by getting together and sharing the knowledge.

That’s right. Yeah, I think, when I was at Microsoft, most of those open source partnerships and business collaborations, we made on the sponsor floor in those booths, as well as some lifelong friends as well. I always say also, for me, I know a lot of women in tech sort of stuck together at that time too, so some great girlfriends I have. But yeah, year after year when you get to meet in person, it’s pretty nice. So we’ll be having our event June 6th through 10th in Austin, so I’m looking forward to that for sure. And then hopefully as the world opens up even more and we grow, then we can start supporting more regional events, and I know some of our folks do some wonderful regional things as well, like Node Forum has an event in Ireland, and there’s lots of others. I just talked to the JS folks in Mexico, they sent me a t-shirt, which was super cool, since, I think I told you, Kin, I live half the year in Mexico.

Nice.

So yeah, that was super cool, I watched part of their conference as well.

Yeah, and so the memories, the swag memories, the connections, that’s what this is all about, I think, is really connecting the dots on all those and having, wearing that shirt at home and knowing, having those memories associated with it, it’s important. What’s your oldest shirt?

Oh, man.

Yeah, I cycle through them pretty rapidly, because I got started in the music industry and I used to collect tour shirts and wear them until they get big holes in them, and then I went through that phase with tech conferences. But I would say, I cycle through, I don’t have anything over a year old, I wear them consistently, that’s all I’ll wear is the same three shirts, and then I ditch them.

Yeah, I know, I was starting to get them for my two boys, and then I see them wearing a cool shirt later, I’m like, why did I give that to them? There’s a few that grab me, and then other swag, stickers, I still really like my stickers and my other desktop things that I collect, some of them stick with me, some of them don’t, so swag is interesting that way.

Thanks for coming, I appreciate the time, and love talking, I have to get together with you and talk policy stuff more, get all wonky sometime, but I think I’ll wait till one of the in-person events so we can meet in person.

Yeah, and you need, I need to meet more of your Postman friends as well, Ben has been pretty awesome having in our community, and you as well, so appreciate all the support we get from you all.

Yeah, well, I’m continuing to evolve our strategy and how we’re investing, and I want to get to know the OpenJS, what’s already in motion, and figure out how we can jump in and contribute more to what’s already happening. Ajv is very critical to our operations, and I want to understand that more, so there’ll be more to come.

Awesome, appreciate it.

Well, thank you so much, Robin, I really appreciate your time today, thanks for joining us.

Yeah, it was fun, thanks.

Thanks again to Robin for stopping by. You can find more about OpenJS at openjsf.org, and you can find Robin on LinkedIn. You can subscribe to the Breaking Changes podcast at postman.com/events/breaking-changes. I’m your host, Kin Lane, and until next time, cheers.