In this talk, I’ll explore the good, bad, and awesome aspects of building Async API into our open data hub. As advocates of open source tools, it is our mission to simplify the collection and distribution of streaming data by taking care of everything under the hood, including business-to-business exchange of data and “last mile” delivery to end consumers. Beginning with a discussion on open API, I’ll walk you through our deliberations, and why we chose AsyncAPI, how it helped us and what it cost. I’ll tell you how we improved our tools to make use of AsyncAPI specs; how we managed the gaps in the specification; along with the benefits. AsyncAPI spun out of open API with a goal to solve some of its shortcomings. The initiative set out to standardize asynchronous and event driven APIs across the industry. With the proliferation of IoT devices and the connectivity promised by 5G, having standard ways to connect has become more important than ever. AsyncAPI has been added to every product we host on our open platform. Why? Because we believe AsyncAPI is a good standard for open event based data/APIs, and we want to support a proper way to carry out code generation and validation - with specifications that make sense. Thousands of software engineers around the world have provided code, documentation, tests, or other improvements to open source projects. With the help of initiatives like AsyncAPI we want to help people liberate their data by tackling the common challenges they face when trying to distribute it.