Writing on APIs & contracts
Deep dives into API contract management, breaking change detection, and how SpecVault works under the hood.
Why We Built SpecVault
API breaking changes discovered in production. The pain of Slack threads as the only contract registry. What a structured, automated approach to API contract tracking changes for teams that ship fast.
Read post →What Counts as a Breaking Change? A Field Guide
A precise taxonomy of breaking vs. non-breaking OpenAPI changes — with before/after YAML examples for each category — so you know exactly what SpecVault flags and why.
Publishing Your OpenAPI Spec from CI/CD
Why manual spec publishing creates drift, and how to wire up SpecVault into your GitHub Actions or GitLab CI pipeline so every deploy automatically updates the registry.
OpenAPI Versioning Strategies That Actually Scale
URL versioning, header versioning, or no versioning at all — the tradeoffs of each approach, and how your choice affects breaking change detection in SpecVault.
Consumer-Driven API Contracts: What They Are and When to Use Them
How CDC tools like Pact work, the setup overhead they require, and when SpecVault's subscription-based model gives you most of the benefit at a fraction of the cost.
Getting Your Team on SpecVault in 10 Minutes
From sign-in to your first breaking-change alert — register a service, publish a spec, add subscribers, and automate publishing from CI. No servers, no setup.
The Hidden Cost of API Contract Drift
When producers and consumers drift apart silently — the prod incidents, the blame games, the emergency patches. Why "we'll communicate the changes" doesn't scale past five teams.