10 years since Tim Hinrichs made the first commit in the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project, OPA has found its way into almost every corner of the world of tech. Deployments of OPA runs in production at some of the largest corporations and organizations on the planet, but not just that — OPA kickstarted the movement now known as Policy as Code, soon inspiring many alternative policy engines to emerge. How did it all come to be?

In this talk, open source advocate Anders Eknert (Apple, OPA maintainer) introduces you to OPA and the role it plays in securing today’s API landscape and enforcing authorization across the stack. Next, he’ll walk you through a decade of milestones and struggles, aiming to provide insights not only into OPA, but the everyday challenges a major open source project faces, and how they can be tackled. We’ll also get to learn how Anders accidentally got involved somewhere along the way.