What It Takes to Turn a Side Project into an Industry Standard: The AsyncAPI Story

Event-driven systems are powerful, but without standardisation, they can become chaotic.

In this session, we’ll explore how AsyncAPI, an open-source project, began as a side project and evolved into an industry standard used by companies like LEGO and eBay.

We’ll focus on:

• What AsyncAPI is

• The problems it solves in event-driven systems

• How it scaled from a small project to widespread adoption

• Lessons for developers: building side projects, contributing to open source, and designing systems at scale

This is an introductory session, giving you a clear picture of what AsyncAPI does, the challenges it addresses, and how it is becoming an industry standard, without diving too deep into technical implementation.

1. Understand the challenges of scaling event-driven systems without clear standards

2. Learn how open source and community-driven development foster trust and adoption

3. Gain practical lessons for building side projects and evolving ideas into industry standards