May 2018 Summaries

Infermedica's Symptom Checker and Medical Diagnosis API presents a compelling tool in the realm of healthcare technology by assisting with patient journeys from triage to diagnosis, offering a potential counterpoint to the notion that automation could replace doctors entirely. The API's capability includes parsing natural language to identify symptoms and providing a list of potential conditions through its "diagnosis" endpoint, although it lacks the empathy of human interaction, as exemplified by its blunt questioning style. Despite these challenges, Infermedica's API is seen as a powerful asset that can streamline doctors' workloads by handling routine diagnostic tasks, allowing them to focus on treatment, and it can be utilized by chatbots or front-office staff to enhance efficiency. While the author expresses a mix of fear and admiration for this technology, recognizing its potential to reshape healthcare, they also emphasize the importance of consulting real doctors for final diagnoses, acknowledging the API's proficiency and the high quality of its documentation.

The League is an exclusive, members-only social and dating app targeting professionals, leveraging data from Facebook and LinkedIn for its selective admissions model. Since its launch in 2015, it has aimed to facilitate better connections among aspiring power couples. The app's engineering team relies heavily on Postman for API management, using it as a knowledge base to organize API versions, facilitate onboarding, and allow non-engineers to engage with API testing and product learning. Postman's features enable The League's team to monitor and manage their backend efficiently, with integrations like PagerDuty providing alerts for unexpected issues, ensuring the app's performance and reliability for users.

Postman workspaces are valuable tools for organizing and collaborating on projects, offering features like source control and shared updates. With the release of Postman v6.1, Business and Enterprise users can now create private workspaces, allowing them to share access with specific team members while maintaining control over who can view or edit the workspace contents. These private workspaces ensure that sensitive collections, environments, mocks, and monitors are only accessible to authorized personnel. To create a private team workspace, users must change the workspace type to "Team" and invite specific team members, thereby restricting visibility to only those invited. This feature enhances collaboration within teams while safeguarding sensitive project components by managing user permissions effectively.

Cisco, a global leader in IT, has been instrumental in advancing internet technologies since 1984, offering secure and intelligent platforms across networking, security, collaboration, and cloud services. Headquartered in San Jose, California, Cisco's DevNet team focuses on educating network and systems engineers, sales engineers, customers, and partners about Cisco's APIs, notably through the use of Postman. Postman is utilized for its simplicity and effectiveness in teaching both basic and advanced API functionalities, enabling users to engage with Cisco's REST API interfaces. The tool is integral to Cisco's educational initiatives, featuring prominently in online tutorials, webinars, and live demonstrations during developer conferences and workshops. Postman Collections, which are curated API request workflows, are shared on Cisco's learning platform to facilitate understanding without needing to write code, thereby enhancing the learning experience for the developer community and accelerating the adoption of Cisco's continuous API releases.

The recent release of a new update feature for the desktop client on Linux introduces an automated update process, simplifying the user experience by eliminating the need for manual installation and cleanup. Previously, Linux users had to manually unpack, reinstall, and clean up after each update, but now they can simply follow in-app instructions to update their app. The update flow is now consistent across all desktop clients, with an indicator appearing on the Settings icon when updates are available. Despite the variety of package managers available for Linux distributions, the developers opted to create their own packaging implementation for more control over the update process. An upcoming blog titled "Postman Under the Hood" will provide further insights into the innovation and implementation behind this new feature.

The text appears to be a series of questions aimed at an individual who has been working at Postman for about two and a half years, focusing on their role and experiences within the company. It inquires about how they began their career at Postman, the technology they work with, and any interesting projects they have recently completed. Additionally, it seeks to uncover what the person believes everyone should know about the Postman app, other development tools they favor, productivity tips they share with friends, and personal insights that might not be widely known.

The new monthly blog series explores Postman's API Network, focusing on the versatile capabilities of SummarizeBot, an entry in the Data Management category. SummarizeBot offers tools for summarizing, analyzing, and classifying various media, including articles, web comments, audio, video, and images, with support for multiple languages. The API's flexible GET and POST options allow users to input data via URLs or binary files, facilitating easy testing of diverse inputs. Highlighting SummarizeBot's utility, the blog discusses using its summarization tool to streamline error log analysis and its sentiment analysis feature to gauge public opinion from Twitter data. Despite some limitations in error reporting, the API is recognized for its powerful natural language processing capabilities, with potential applications in sentiment tracking and content summarization, enhanced by its Blockchain-powered infrastructure.