Open discussion on the future of OpenAPI-to-GraphQL

[Alan-Cha]

Hello! My name is Alan Cha and I helped write OpenAPI-to-GraphQL with the help of @ErikWittern and @laredo. Currently, I am the primary maintainer of OtG.

In an effort to become more transparent, we wanted to reach out to community, give some insight to what we're doing behind the scenes, and ask for suggestions to help us improve. We also want to get to know more about our users, the direction they think OtG should go, and anything else they have in mind. This is meant to be an open-ended discussion so anything goes!
A little bit more about myself. I started working on OtG summer of 2017. Back then, OtG was called OASGraph and I was just an intern. At the end of my internship, we were really proud of what we had made and we wanted to take it to the next step! We wrote a paper, open sourced it, and I started working as a full-time software engineer. At some point, we also went through a name change and here we are!

However, because we're all completely new to open sourcing, managing packages, and maintaining a public repo, we're learning as we go. We want you to give us some feedback on what we're doing well and what we could be doing better.
I can start off!

I think we have a decent track record when it comes to responding to issues. I check for notifications multiple times a day and try to respond as soon as I can. However, occasionally I do put off responding and even occasionally forget to answer a few issues.

I think one of the problems we have review PRs and turn around speed. As much as I would love to, I cannot actively work on OtG on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, I have a number of other responsibilities at work so it's not realistic for me to consistently work on OtG. As a result, I have the habit of reviewing PRs and creating new features but not finishing them due to other work. I think one way we could help address this issue is to find interested community members who would like to become maintainers and help us steer OtG in the right direction. We do not know how that would all work as we're learning as we go, but it is something we are interested in.

Feel free to let us know your thoughts down below. Ask questions about me if you'd like. This is all an open discussion!

Also please take a look at the roadmap #342 if you haven't done so already!

[StarpTech]

Is there no interest by IBM to keep this library up-to-date? Is it used in production? For me, it sounds like you need to maintain this project in your spare time. Would you be open to onboard maintainers who are able to review PRs?

[Alan-Cha]

@StarpTech Hi, I am interested in keeping this library up to date but as the sole maintainer of the library and as my focus has unfortunately shifted away from GraphQL, it is very hard to spare the time to review PRs. Yes, I am open to onboarding maintainers. However, I am inexperienced in this regard. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

[Pagebakers]

Hey @Alan-Cha, I'm a colleague of @StarpTech. We would like to join as maintainers to keep this library going. Will you still have enough time to lead the project? We're happy to talk about the roadmap and how to go forward, we can set up a call to discuss details.

[Alan-Cha]

@Pagebakers New maintainers would be greatly appreciated. I'm not sure how much time I can devote to leading this project but we can have a meeting first to get to know each other and discuss the options. Feel free to shoot me an email.