I’m writing this to share some personal news that I’m incredibly excited about. I’ve officially joined Hookdeck as VP & General Manager of a new product called Outpost.
This isn’t a decision I took lightly. My time since leaving Postman has been invaluable, allowing me to focus on building my own ventures. But when Alex at Hookdeck showed me what they were building, I saw a rare opportunity. A chance to solve a fundamental, unglamorous problem that plagues our industry and aligns perfectly with my view of an event-driven world.
We’ve spent years working on the “front half” of event-driven architectures. With AsyncAPI, we’ve focused on standardizing how we describe our event-driven systems. With Hookdeck’s core product, the focus is on reliably receiving and managing inbound events (like webhooks).
But what about the “second half”? What happens when you need to send events out?
Every platform that wants to offer webhooks to its users eventually hits a wall. They’re forced to build a complex, internal “dispatch” system from scratch. They have to solve for retries, observability, security, and —most painfully— giving their users a choice of destinations.
This is the exact problem Outpost is built to solve.
Outpost is an open-source project that serves as a dedicated, reliable event dispatch layer. It’s designed to be the “outbound” infrastructure for any platform.
More importantly, it’s built around the concept of Event Destinations.
Right now, “webhooks” are the default. But in reality, your users don’t just want a generic HTTP POST.
- One user wants the event sent to an SQS queue.
- Another wants it delivered to a Google Pub/Sub topic.
- A third wants it streamed to Kafka.
Outpost is designed to make this “multi-destination” world a first-class citizen. It’s the piece of infrastructure that allows a platform to tell its users, “Send your events wherever you want, however you want.”
This is where it all clicks for me.
My work at AsyncAPI has always been about creating a common language for a decoupled, event-driven future. But for that future to work, we need more than just specs. We need standardized, open, and reliable infrastructure that implements those ideas.
Outpost is a massive step in that direction. It’s the “implementation” that proves the “specification.”
By joining Hookdeck to lead Outpost, I’m not changing my mission. I’m accelerating it. I get to take all the theory we’ve been discussing at AsyncAPI and apply it to a real-world product that solves a massive developer pain point.
As for my other work, this new role is part of my “portfolio” approach. I’ll continue to work in the AsyncAPI governance board and, of course, write this newsletter.
Commune, however, will be slowing down for a bit. My main priority for the next months is to get fully landed at Hookdeck and give Outpost the focused launch it deserves. Once I’m settled, I’ll be picking up speed on Commune again.
I’m excited to have a new, concrete platform to share my learnings from. Expect to hear a lot more about the challenges of building reliable, multi-destination event delivery product.
We’re just getting started.
