Time after time I’ve encountered teams who understand the importance of API Change Management, but do not have the mechanisms in place to understand how their APIs change over time.

To me, this has always felt like it should in the bucket of ‘solved problems’. We have amazing change management tools for our code and our infrastructure, but not the APIs that are run by that code, on that infrastructure.

Now Available: The Optic GitBot#

Imagine a GitBot that made it easy for teams to understand how/when their APIs change. Enter the Optic GitBot, which automatically adds an API Changelog to Pull Requests within your project. With the bot installed, developers understand how each PR affects their API contract and can use these insights during code review.

When you open a PR, Optic diffs the specifications in your PR branch against the base branch to produce a semantic changelog, then comments on the PR. It's that easy.

The following post is a conversation with Victor, the author and maintainer of wgcf

With the release of Optic 8.2 a few weeks ago, major improvements were made to both performance, and the reliability of the diff. Version 8.2 is noticeably faster, but the performance still breaks down when a large number of endpoints have been documented or when diffing large JSON Bodies (multiple MBs). We had hoped the improvements in 8.2 would cary us through the end of the year, but some large teams trying to adopt Optic are still blocked by poor performance -- often having to wait several seconds between critical actions.

Today we're launching Optic 8.2.0 — a big push to make Optic much more usable.

Major Improvements#

The Diff UX has been completely redesigned to make creating and updating your specification much easier. (Under the hood) Performance has been 100x faster evaluating large captures (1000s of API Requests) (Under the hood) snapshot tests now verify the diffing logic at the core of Optic, catch regressions, and help us develop more confidently. Our new process for fixing diff bugs requires us to add more use cases to these test suites so that all fixes are backed up by tests going forward