January 2018 Summaries

The Movember Foundation, known for its annual moustache-growing campaign to raise awareness of men's health issues, has expanded into a global movement with offices in several major cities and funds numerous men's health projects. The foundation's engineering team manages complex fundraising efforts across 20 countries, addressing challenges like multiple payment gateways and localization, while relying on Postman Pro for team collaboration and API testing. Postman Pro facilitates smooth onboarding, workflow demonstration, and efficient communication by allowing the team to share and sync collections, ensuring everyone operates with the most current information. The team follows a Scrum agile workflow, releasing updates every two weeks and utilizing Postman tests to ensure API endpoints function correctly and gauge performance, providing confidence during system upgrades.

Postman's enhanced search function now allows users to search across collections, folders, requests, and responses, providing a more comprehensive set of results by delving into all of a user's Postman data. Future updates will expand this capability to include environments, monitors, and mocks. This new search functionality is accessible via the Postman Dashboard on the Postman website, with results varying if searched from the local app, especially when not signed into Postman. Users may experience a delay in search results reflecting recent changes to collections, folders, or requests, requiring a brief wait for updates to appear.

Postman, a platform renowned for engaging with its community across various channels such as Twitter, GitHub, and email, recognized the need for a more structured communication method among its users. While Slack had been useful for quick responses, its limitations in managing interwoven and repetitive conversations prompted Postman to transition to a forum-based system using Discourse. This move allows for more accessible and in-depth discussions, particularly helpful for new users and providing insight into user needs. To ensure important posts are not overlooked, Postman employs its monitoring capabilities to track the Help and Just Getting Started categories on Discourse, leveraging the Discourse API to be alerted when posts go unanswered. The platform encourages users to engage with the community forum and offers guidance on setting up Postman monitoring for those managing similar forums.

Postman has introduced a new Dashboard feature that users can opt into by starting a week-long Pro trial, offering enhanced navigation and centralized access to Collection information like documentation, activity, monitors, and mocks. This Dashboard also allows users to view individual team profiles for shared collections, streamlining collaboration. Additionally, the billing process is simplified with an efficient organizational structure that provides control over billing settings and tasks, such as changing subscription plans or assigning user roles, making it easier to upgrade and manage a Pro subscription.

LoopBack is an open-source tool used for generating NodeJS REST APIs, demonstrated through a tutorial that creates a Jeopardy API using LoopBack, MongoDB, and IBM Cloud, and tests it with Postman. The process involves exporting the API definition to generate a Swagger file, which is imported into Postman to facilitate API testing. Users can manage environments in Postman to switch between different server setups, and employ JavaScript snippets to automate tests, such as ensuring a 200 status code for responses. The tutorial highlights creating a workflow by using environment variables to link requests and writing tests to verify data integrity. Additionally, it explores running entire collections of requests using the Postman Runner, Newman command line tool, or scheduling runs on Postman’s servers for automated monitoring.

A Data Engineer at Postman has been with the company for eight months, engaging with various interesting datasets and utilizing a range of technologies. The role involves working with the Postman app, which is highlighted for its unique features. The engineer reflects on recent cool projects and personal experiences, offering insights into the daily operations and inviting potential candidates to join the expanding team.