Articles on quobix

OpenAPI Doctor Spring 2026 Update

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 04:30:38 -0500

“Oh god, another article about OpenAPI. Please, quobix, shut up.”

No. I will not.

Until this problem is solved and I no longer need to think about OpenAPI tools and products, because OpenAPI has been buried as a commodity… I will not shut up.

TLDR; What’s new

Once upon a time

In 2019, we were looking at this problem in detail because the company I worked at (VMware) was drowning in piles of absolute dogshit APIs.

openapi-changes sucks

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 04:30:38 -0500

“openapi-changes is a big pile of tangled shit, and I would avoid it for now. It works, but it’s janky-ass software.“

What a quote!

It’s not verbal bashing from a customer or a competitor - it’s my own.

openapi-changes sucks

Hearing someone bash your baby, insult your labor of love, or crush your creativity is never easy. And quite frankly, if we’re honest, it hurts.

“Your work is bad, and you are not worthy.”

Automating screenshots with Claude Code

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 04:30:38 -0500

Taking screenshots can be seamless in Claude Code with this simple automation.

The problem

I take a lot of screenshots to show Claude just how far off the rails it has run.

It is slow and annoying to drag and drop images into my terminals and clutter up my desktop with hundreds of screenshots.

There is a simple way to automate taking screenshots and pasting them directly into my terminal.

OpenAPI 3.2 is here

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 04:30:38 -0500

I love that new feature smell

40,248 hours, or
1,677 days, or
55 months, or
4 years.

That’s how long we had to wait between OpenAPI 3.1 and OpenAPI 3.2.

Was it worth it? Let’s find out!

Upgraded tags

The Tag object can now operate hierarchically:

summary field to allow additional metadata to be supplied for a tag.
parent field that points to the parent tag.
kind field that provides the ability to categorize or group tags.

The kind field is freeform, but really the goal is to establish a registry of known types like nav or badge.

vacuum gets a facelift

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 03:30:38 -0500

I hate this

Running the lint command on vacuum would result in the same ugly mess spewed out of my terminal; haphazard, uncoordinated, and higgledy-piggledy. Not to mention the quite awful dashboard command would frustrate the pants off anyone trying to depend on it.

Sloppy and slapdash, it looked like AI had generated it, except it hadn’t.

I had generated it and created that mess.

Time to fix that.

More specifically, time to fix the fact that vacuum’s terminal experience was built without any design in mind.

Time Travel for OpenAPI

Sat, 03 May 2025 03:30:38 -0500

Doctor, Who?

The Doctor has always fascinated me as a character or concept. They are a one-off, unique lifeform unlike any other in the universe, and each generation of the Doctor is also unique.

The OpenAPI Doctor is named partially after my love of character, as well as because it’s a literal heath-check, testing, and monitoring application for OpenAPI.

FYI: I am not a fan of the current generation of Doctor Who.

OpenAPI is hard

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 03:30:38 -0500

OpenAPI is hard

About three years ago, in early 2022, I was sitting at my desk at 6 a.m. with my head in my hands.

I was absolutely sure it was going to work this time—I was sure I had nailed it. But alas, it turned out to be just another way to fail.

The problem staring me in the face was the same one every engineer encounters early on when pursuing this mission:

Introducing: The Doctor

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 05:30:38 -0500

The reason why all this exists

As a massive fan of Doctor Who, a ‘Whovian’ as we’re called, I had already picked the name for this product years ago. I can’t think of a better name for what the Doctor does.

In the Doctor Who universe, The Doctor is a time lord that travels the universe throughout all time and space, helping people in need and standing up for the little guy.

Introducing wiretap

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 03:19:38 -0500

If you know nothing about OpenAPI or don’t care about developer experience, engineering tools, or APIs, I’d skip this article as It will bore the shit out of you.

Now, if you do care about sexy productivity tools for developers, then read on. I have something to share with you.

But before I do, let me ask you three questions:

Question 1:

Do you know if your UI/client sends the correct data to your backend/API?

Question 2:

Introducing openapi-changes

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 08:19:38 -0500

You’re probably thinking, “wow what a boring name”.

I know it’s boring. It’s also the best thing I could come up with.

All the other tools with similar functionality (but nowhere near as sexy) had already taken all the variations I could come up with.

So, I named it literally. Boring, but practical! Like a minivan.

Except this minivan has a bar and a disco inside it, with room for 100 of your friends.

So what is it?

A new tool from pb33f that I created. Essentially, it’s a time machine that allows you to discover what has changed between two versions of an OpenAPI contract.

How to check your API is compliant with an OpenAPI specification

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 05:19:38 -0500

This is a walkthrough of how you can check the compliance of an OpenAPI specification against a client (like a UI, CLI, or SDK) and server or actual API endpoint.

We will use an application called wiretap.

Watch the video

This video will walk you through the steps of checking the compliance of an OpenAPI specification against a client and server.

What is wiretap?

wiretap is an API compliance testing tool that allows us to ’tap-into’ requests and responses between clients and servers and validate that those requests and responses comply with the OpenAPI specification defined.

How to check for breaking changes in an OpenAPI specification

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 03:19:38 -0500

I assume you’re trying to compare an original and an updated spec or want to check a single spec against a previous commit in a Git repo.

We will use an application called openapi-changes.

Watch the video

This video will walk you through how to use openapi-changes and will showcase all the available commands and how to use them.

What is openapi-changes?

openapi-changes is the world’s sexiest OpenAPI breaking change detector. It allows you to compare two OpenAPI specifications and see what changed. It’s like git diff for OpenAPI (but way, way sexier)

How to get nothing done

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 05:30:38 -0500

A day in the life

Finally, I have a clear afternoon!

It’s time to get some actual work done, finally! I’m excited about coding and being productive for a change.

My brain is engaged. I am in the zone and in a state of flow. I can see the matrix.

My phone buzzes in my pocket 30 minutes into my session.

It’s a Slack message.

Immediately my entire train of thought is interrupted, like a record needle scratching across an in-motion record. It feels like an electric bolt of annoyance surging through my whole body.

Rise of the builder

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 11:17:41 -0500

As we knew it, the world stopped operating according to standard operating procedures in 2016.

And then, suddenly, it came to a complete halt in 2020.

What happened in 2016?

We reached a boiling point in the west driven by the extreme left and right politics that dominated media outlets, mainly social media, and terrible cable news networks like Fox News and CNN.

The outcome led to events like Brexit and the January 6th Capitol Attack — a pivotal point in history for the modern world.

How to give a better demo

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 05:19:38 -0500

If you’re looking to level up your skills as a software engineer, one thing you need to pay attention to is the importance of giving a great demonstration of new features or code that you’ve created.

If you prefer a video format, you can watch the video version of this article on YouTube:

It boils down to one thing

There’s a single overarching guiding principle that brings all the following advice together.

Parsing OpenAPI files using go

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 15:54:43 -0500

Updated Jun 24th 2024: The API for iterating over maps in libopenapi was changed in v0.14 to use ordered maps, instead of regular maps. This change was made to ensure that the order of items in the map is preserved when rendering back out the OpenAPI specification. A few folks reported issues with this blog here and here. So I updated the code in this blog to reflect those changes.

Updated Sept 22nd 2025: In v0.28+ []error is no longer returned at the high level interfaces

Introducing vacuum

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 06:46:55 -0500

I want to take you back to the fizzy and exciting times of 2016.

I had just exited the M.A.R.V.I.N project at VMware and was a little lost.

I had no mission and no goals. I was floating in the ether, looking for gaps, holes, anything that I could fill up with and hide for a while so that I could collect my thoughts.

A stranger with a smile

One afternoon in February or March, a gentleman named Akmal Khan approached me. Akmal has over 40 years of engineering and leadership experience.

How to beat Impostor Syndrome

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 10:46:55 -0500

Ah, we meet again, my old friend.

After recently joining Splunk, I got to experience a bit of an old nemesis of mine after being bombarded by firehoses of new data and information. It’s been a while since I felt it, but it’s no less awful than I remember.

Over the years, I’ve learned how to re-orient my thinking when that feeling appears. This article describes how I deal with it and some techniques that might be helpful to you.

Hello, Splunk!

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 14:19:38 -0500

A distinguished engineer

Today I started a brand new role at Splunk. I’ve joined as Distinguished Engineer in the Security group as UI Architect of SaaS Applications.

In 1997 I founded hack-net.com (don’t visit the site). It was one of the most significant security-related websites on the internet for a while. We used to get millions of visitors a week and had 20+ contributors on the platform.

What happened to it?

Music, Girls, and Alcohol got in the way. Like a fool, I closed it down in 2002.

How to build a React based pub-sub client using WebSockets and JavaScript

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 09:14:17 -0500

Watch the video

This is quick tutorial to help you understand the basic mechanics of how Pub-Sub works and how you can call an asynchronous API from a browser using JavaScript, STOMP, and WebSockets. We’re going to build a simple

If you’re not familiar with STOMP, it stands for (S)imple (T)ext (O)riented (M)essaging (P)rotocol. It’s a straightforward but stable protocol that makes interacting with a message or event-based APIs a breeze.

Thank you, VMware.

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 08:06:56 -0500

This is my story about the most incredible time I had at VMware. I want to tell you about the most valuable experience I had; it’s the one thing that I can never thank VMware enough for.

A bumpy arrival

In early 2012, I was the CTO of a failing start-up that I co-founded. Money had dried up; I had to let go of everything.

I had recently emigrated to the USA from the UK, and my (ex) wife was divorcing me because she had fallen in love with another man she had met while I was trying to build a business.

How to create a streaming AsyncAPI microservice using golang.

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 13:07:35 -0400

Watch the video

If you want to learn more about AsyncAPI, head over to AsyncAPI.com and find out more about the standard and the power it provides us.

Moving forward, I will assume that you already know what AsyncAPI is and want to use it in your golang applications.

How to create an event-driven API via AsyncAPI using golang.

Thu, 16 Dec 2021 13:07:35 -0400

Watch the video

If you want to learn more about AsyncAPI, head over to AsyncAPI.com and find out more about the standard and the power it provides us.

Moving forward, I will assume that you already know what AsyncAPI is and want to use it in your golang applications.

M.A.R.V.I.N

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 09:17:42 -0400

It was February 2013, and I had just moved to San Francisco. I had been working for VMware for around eight months.

I was excited to be working (finally) in Silicon Valley; A dream of mine since childhood.

One wintery afternoon, Mornay Van Der Walt Called me into his office. He asked me

“Do you think we could build a prototype that installs and configures an entire SDDC in a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance format and do it in under 15 Minutes”?

TrashBox, Engineering a solution to memory loss.

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 15:23:07 -0400

“Dammit, why am I unable to get this under control!” I thought to myself as I ran, dragging two weeks worth of hot, stinking garbage toward the collection truck that was just about to drive past my house again.

It’s late August in Virginia in 2017, which isn’t great for storing garbage outside your house. My wife is newly pregnant and understandably losing her patience with me.

Hot and annoyed at myself, I reach for my pocket (and remember I’m still in my underpants), suddenly it dawns on me:

What is Experience Engineering?

Sun, 26 Sep 2021 13:07:35 -0400

OK, so I know I just said that it’s an actual term. It’s a term that I’ve kind of made up. It is, however, composed of real things that all revolve around designing and building experiences.

More than just user interface

It’s easy to default to “…oh you mean UI, right?” when talking about engineering experiences.

The reality, however, is the term ‘UI’ means more than a browser-based application. UI goes way beyond that. ‘UI’ could be a reference to one of the following: