February 2016 Summaries

Fuzz Productions, now Monstarlab, is a New York-based mobile-first digital agency known for developing products for high-profile clients like Forever21 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their development process, divided into native and backend teams, initially faced challenges due to the simultaneous start of native and backend development, leading to communication issues and inconsistencies in API documentation. To address these challenges, Fuzz adopted Postman Cloud, which improved real-time communication, synchronized API documentation, and created a centralized API source of truth. This shift not only streamlined developer communication and maintained project timelines but also empowered the QA team to become more self-sufficient by enabling them to independently test endpoints and identify issues. Overall, Postman's use has enhanced efficiency, reduced developer time, and improved the quality of Fuzz's end products.

Postman has launched its first native Mac app, Postman for Mac 4.0, moving out of beta after receiving feedback from over 19,000 users who were eager for an alternative to Chrome. The newly released app offers a smoother and more performant user experience by leveraging design improvements and using React to overhaul the app's view layer. It retains popular features such as the testing suite, request chaining, and team collaboration, while introducing new functionality for Cloud users, including the ability to share environments with environment templates that balance shareability and privacy. These templates allow users to hide sensitive values while retaining keys for environment variables, enhancing team efficiency when working on APIs. The app aims to deliver a high-performance native experience with a sleek design, promising further improvements in the coming weeks.

Coursera, an online education platform, collaborates with global universities and organizations to provide a wide range of courses, having pioneered the concept of MOOCs in 2012. The platform serves both learners, who choose courses from various fields, and university partners, who provide new course content. Coursera’s service-oriented architecture supports a vast array of APIs, facilitating communication between the learner and partner sides while enabling rapid service development and deployment. To manage the fast-paced innovation and partner onboarding without overburdening engineers, Coursera adopted Postman, which allowed the operations team to handle API interactions independently. This adoption enhanced productivity by enabling the operations team to work with minimal technical knowledge, effectively bridging the gap between operations and engineering. The use of Postman extended beyond developers to other organizational teams, demonstrating the broader applicability of accessible APIs in improving operational efficiency.

cURL is a widely used command line tool for making API calls, but its complexity can be cumbersome for users. Postman offers a user-friendly alternative with a graphical interface that simplifies the process of adding or removing parameters and allows users to save requests, which cURL does not support. Postman enhances cURL's usability in two main ways: by enabling users to create cURL commands through its code snippet generator and by allowing the import and execution of cURL requests within Postman. Additionally, Postman provides the flexibility to convert requests into various programming languages, such as Go, Objective-C, and Python, catering to diverse user needs.