Fanfare please… it’s the Tyk Community Awards 2020!

2020 has been an unusual year, to say the least. But if it sometimes seems the world is going crazy all around you, rest assured that some things remain true to their roots – like the Tyk Community Awards!

Over the last year we’ve launched our fabulous new GraphQL features, expanded our global team of Tyklings, released Tyk 3.0 and found time to launch our very own side project fund.  In the last few weeks alone our visionary qualities have been recognised by Gartner MQ.

Yes, we could let all this go to our head and abandon our open source, community-based roots in favour of the mega-bucks but – spoiler alert – that’s really not our style. Our community holds us to account, pushes us to do more and go further,  as well as contributing and innovating when it comes to API acceleration. I guess what we’re trying to say is that we couldn’t have done it without you.   A huge thank you to everyone playing their part to kick down the barriers to API adoption.

Now it’s time to roll out the (virtual) red carpet and reveal the winners of the Tyk Community Awards 2020! Each of our winners have gone above and beyond to contribute to API acceleration over the past year.

Without further ado, the class of 2020 winners are:

Xavier Ortiz, Hotelbeds

Xavier has paid special attention to the Kafka analytics pump. He has submitted pull requests that have driven forward innovations, including enhancing the Tyk Pump to deliver better filtering.

As a result of Xavier’s contribution,  Tyk can now ship request analytics to Apache Kafka, enabling its own metrics engine to be fine grained and tailored to HotelBeds’s data sinks.

This contribution means that Tyk users can now have their own consumers to send to their own data sinks. Nice one, Xavier!

Check out how it works.

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Dima Nevelev, GE

Dima from GE Digital has made a massive contribution to API adoption and our community in a multitude of ways.

Dima submitted pull requests to Tyk’s OSS API gateway in order to enhance the caching capabilities. This was no straightforward task so Dima pulled his sleeves up & learned the gateway’s code to enhance this feature. His coding work shows a superb understanding of the gateway’s code base and also includes cover of unit tests. Dima also patiently took the time to address all the comments and the addition of unit tests shows meticulous care.

This was a great contribution for, not only GE Digital but the Tyk community too. Check out how it’s done here.

It’s one thing creating additions and improvements but sharing it with the wider community for others to benefit from is something else. Not many enterprises allow this kind of contribution, so thank you to GE Digital and thank you to Dima for the fantastic contribution to our community!

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Bruno Monteiro

A data communications, API management and security specialist (by day). Bruno only started using Tyk a few months back but has already poured plenty of time into sharing and contributing as an active member of our community.

Bruno is constantly making suggestions for our OSS documentation, is ready to contribute and even rolls up his sleeves and gets his hands dirty by collaborating with our engineers on a JWKs support (JSON Web Key Set J)

If all this wasn’t enough, Bruno has a Tyk deployment in Kubernetes cluster (created with our helm), including use of  ISTIO service mesh for his microservice, and a Tyk-identity-broker to SSO using Okta as users directory for his microservices. Pretty cool, right? To hear more, please follow our comms as he will soon run a live demo of his real-life deployment.

With Bruno’s input, both our API adoption and community engagement are evolving to make a huge difference. APIs make things work better, so we’re here to shout about those who contribute to them doing just that. Great work, Bruno!

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Taylor Price and Jacob Jensen, GPS Insight

Taylor and Jacob have been contributing to API adoption and acceleration by working with Tyk for many years. Not only have they implemented Tyk at multiple companies, the duo have contributed to GitHub and open source, as well as updating our helm charts for k8.

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what they had to say:

“Tyk has seemed to follow us around a couple different jobs. It’s a really good ‘batteries included’ API gateway, with a ton of features available out of the box. We are using it to manage ingress inside of Kubernetes, and it is allowing us to focus on our business value instead of solving authorization, rate-limiting, and other access-related problems ourselves.”

Now with GPS Insights, Taylor and Jacob remain active contributors, helping boost API adoption and acceleration in multiple ways. Keep up to date with their contributions on their GitHub accounts: Taylor, Jacob.

Thank you, Taylor and Jacob!

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Ross Bender, RBFCU

Ross, from RBFCU has been contributing to our open source products for donkey’s years. He’s given us so many great ideas, we’ve lost count!

Ross has been critical in helping push response plugins and customizable 404 responses. Both of these contributions started out as ideas that Ross pushed through until they’ve become full-blown features.

He’s even crossed over into helping with our documentation, as well as doing plenty to identify and report any bugs.

We’re delighted to recognise Ross’ tireless contributions with a Tyk Community Award. Together we’re breaking down barriers to API adoption one step at a time! Check out more from Ross via his GitHub.

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Congratulations to all our winners! 

We’re sending out a covetable bag of Tyk swag to each of our 2020 Community Awards winners to say thank you for their contributions, creativity and dedication.

Tyk has grown into the impressive product that it is today thanks to its open source nature and the involvement of our community. We can’t send swag to each and every one of you, but we can certainly say a huge Thank You!

We appreciate every single contribution from our community members. Of course, if you’re all about the free stuff then do keep contributing and you could be in the running for one of our Community Awards next year. 

Until then…

Usually, we would share our plans for the Tyk Tour with you at this point. Of course, 2020 has caused us to innovate and adapt in plenty of ways, so this year the Tyk Tour has morphed into an ambition to connect more deeply with our community virtually.

We want to reach out to as many of you as possible over the next year and one of the ways we’re doing so is through our Tyk webinars. We’ve extracted plenty of wisdom from our Tyklings in order to create some super-exciting content that you can engage with, from regular updates to on-demand resources.

Why not check them out and let us know what you think? And if there’s a topic you want us to explore in more detail, drop us a line to let us know!

We’re living through interesting times, to say the least. Tyk has been on a mission to change the world – through APIs – for some time now. As we hurtle towards 2021, we’re looking forward to working more closely with our community to change it together. Because if ever there was a time to work together to do all we can to improve the world around us, it’s right now.