Hexmos Lama2

At Hexmos, our engineering infrastructure is split into dozens of self-contained software services. We deal with 100s of internal APIs, and so felt a need for a robust workflow for defining, sharing and updating APIs within our teams. Traditional solutions such as Postman/Insomnia implement the collaboration features within their applications, and also tend to charge a fee for collaboration. We felt using git is the right way to collaborate on APIs, rather than any custom built solution. So, in a matter of 2-days we got a regex-based prototype DSL language to store API files. Lots of issues cropped up over time, but we kept making improvements to Lama2 as needs arose. Hexmos accumulated 100s of APIS over time. Then, we decided that the tool deserves to be out there, benefiting teams that want to collaborate on APIs over git. So, to make it happen, first we invested into formalising the grammar, and implementing the DSL as a hand-written recursive descent parser. Then we invested into helpful documentation, demos and so on. Once we had the basics, we released Lama2 into the world.