November 2020 Summaries

Postman has enhanced its functionality as an API development platform by improving the OAuth 2.0 token generation and retrieval process, making it more seamless for collaborative environments. Users can now save and share the necessary information to generate an OAuth 2.0 token with requests or collections, eliminating the need to repeatedly enter these details. This feature is particularly beneficial for managing multiple OAuth servers or sharing requests with others who need token details. Additionally, Postman provides the option to selectively sync OAuth tokens with a request or collection, offering better access control and security for sensitive information. Users can generate and use tokens locally even if they are not editors, while the platform retains token generation information within the app session for easy restoration after upgrades. These improvements facilitate collaboration in building, testing, and managing APIs while ensuring secure handling of authentication data.

Postman's Community Spotlight series highlights contributors like Pricilla Bilavendran, a Senior QA Engineer from Billennium IT Services in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, who has actively engaged with the Postman Community forum since August 2020. Despite being relatively new to the platform, Pricilla has quickly become a valuable member, reading over 1,600 posts and making 57 replies within her first three months. Her motivation stems from a desire to give back to the community that helped her when she began using Postman a year ago. She appreciates the professional and personal growth opportunities the forum provides and is committed to ongoing learning and contribution. Billennium's focus on building APIs for client needs has led them to adopt Postman's business plan to enhance their API testing capabilities with automation scripts. Pricilla's enthusiasm and engagement are emblematic of the vibrant and supportive Postman Community, which offers a space for API users to connect, ask questions, and share knowledge.

Postman has introduced support for a static IP address to facilitate integration workflows with third-party systems hosted on private networks, enhancing API creation, testing, and maintenance processes. This update allows Postman to communicate securely with private networks by adding the static IP address to a firewall's allow-list, thereby enabling use cases such as backing up collections on GitHub or GitLab custom domains and communicating with webhooks for activities like receiving monitor run results or activity feeds. Users can configure these integrations by accessing the Team Home Page, selecting the relevant integration tiles, and completing the configuration forms to establish connections between Postman and private network systems. This development aims to streamline workflows and improve connectivity between Postman and other tools operating within private networks, with the promise of additional use cases to be added in the future.

Allen Helton, a software engineering manager, shares his experience with a frustrating breaking change in his home automation setup, which led to a broader discussion on the importance of avoiding such changes in API development. Breaking changes, which occur when updates fail to maintain backward compatibility, can cause significant disruptions for users and are a common issue in the API industry. Helton emphasizes the need for automation in detecting breaking changes, introducing a Postman Template that can be integrated into CI pipelines to automatically check for such changes. By versioning APIs and using tools like Postman, developers can manage updates more effectively and prevent disruptions. Helton encourages developers to integrate these practices into their governance models and invites the community to share their experiences and improvements to help strengthen API management practices.

Postman, initially a simple API testing tool, has evolved based on user feedback into a robust platform with over 17 million developers across 500,000 organizations, emphasizing collaboration capabilities. The introduction of Postman public workspaces, now in beta, marks a significant advancement by allowing collaboration beyond team boundaries, similar to massively multiplayer games where a large community interacts. This feature enables users from different teams or companies to work together on APIs, enhancing the search, discovery, and interaction with APIs. The public workspaces can be based on various themes, including interests, culture, or science, showcasing limitless possibilities. Postman's own public workspace includes collections that facilitate diverse workflows such as automation, integration, and API lifecycle management, with enhanced governance and security measures. Users are encouraged to explore these public workspaces, provide feedback, and participate in upcoming events to further understand and leverage the platform's capabilities.

The Postman Galaxy virtual API conference, scheduled for February 2-4, 2021, will feature Dr. Ellen Ochoa, the first Latina astronaut and a former NASA astronaut, as a keynote speaker. This event provides a unique opportunity to learn from Dr. Ochoa, whose career at NASA spanned 30 years, including her role as the first Hispanic and second female director of the Johnson Space Center. Known for her pioneering spirit and dedication to scientific discovery, Dr. Ochoa will engage in a wide-ranging Q&A session, sharing insights from her nearly 1,000 hours in space and her leadership of the U.S. human space flight enterprise from 2013 to 2018. The conference is free and open to anyone interested, offering attendees the chance to hear from Dr. Ochoa as she continues to champion women, minorities, and technology, alongside a roster of other inspiring presenters.

Twitter's release of version 2.0 of its popular social media API offers enhanced functionality and ease of use, particularly when accessed through the Postman API Network. The Twitter API v2 collection in Postman simplifies the onboarding process, allowing developers to quickly set up applications, configure authentication with OAuth 1.0 or 2.0 Bearer Tokens, and start making API calls within minutes. Comprehensive documentation and an intuitive environment support developers in exploring various API requests, such as the "Recent Search" feature, which allows for flexible tweet searches using diverse query parameters. This collection not only facilitates developer engagement with Twitter's API but also exemplifies best practices for API providers aiming to create user-friendly, well-documented collections that streamline the onboarding process and enhance developer experience. Additional insights and practical guidance can be found in Postman's webinar that explores the integration of Twitter API capabilities with Postman.

Lorna Mitchell, a developer advocate at Vonage, discusses the benefits of the newly published Vonage APIs Postman Collection, which simplifies the process for developers to interact with Vonage's communication APIs. This collection enhances the developer experience by reducing the "Time to First API Call" using familiar tools like Postman, where developers can easily integrate and manage API calls. The Verify API, part of the collection, illustrates this by providing a streamlined two-step process for confirming user telephone details with features that include environment variables for API credentials and collection-level variables for managing data flow between requests. These improvements not only facilitate a smoother API interaction but also allow developers to efficiently sequence API calls without needing to manually manage data between requests. By offering these enhancements, Vonage aims to make its APIs more accessible and user-friendly, encouraging developers to leverage their APIs with greater ease and effectiveness.

Over the past two decades, organizations have increasingly recognized the critical role of data in decision-making, with Gartner predicting that by 2022, most corporate strategies will emphasize information as a key asset and analytics as an essential skill. While numerous resources exist to teach data analysis, the more crucial question is determining what data to analyze and why. The text distinguishes between actionable metrics, which drive concrete business actions and can be tied to business goals, and vanity metrics, which may appear relevant but lack impact on decision-making. For instance, metrics like the number of active, activated, and retained users are considered actionable as they directly correlate with business objectives and user behavior, unlike metrics such as the number of downloads, which is often a vanity metric. The reproducibility of results is emphasized as a hallmark of actionable metrics, while vanity metrics, despite their limitations, can highlight the need for more meaningful data collection. Ultimately, the text advocates for starting with a clearly defined problem statement to identify relevant data trends, ensuring that the analysis leads to well-defined actions for business objectives.

Postman highlights the contributions of Orest Danylewycz, an Information Security Engineer from Cleveland, Ohio, who is a highly engaged member of the Postman Community forum, ranking as the third most active participant. Since joining the community in October 2019, Orest has contributed over 140 replies and read 1,400 posts, driven by a desire to reciprocate the knowledge he gained from learning about software development and APIs. His involvement began with a transition to Postman at his workplace, leading him to share his expertise through the forum and his educational YouTube channel, Dev Odyssey. His efforts have been rewarding, as they help others achieve IT and career goals, an experience he describes as infectious. Orest also authored an insightful guest post on the Postman blog about the Postman Visualizer, further emphasizing his commitment to enhancing the API community's knowledge and engagement.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) API Gateway, introduced in 2015, has integrated seamlessly with Postman over the years, enhancing API management across major cloud platforms. Postman now offers a new integration with AWS API Gateway, available within each workspace via Postman's web dashboard, allowing users to sync OpenAPI and Swagger definitions directly to AWS. This integration automates tasks to reduce workload and streamline the design, development, and management of APIs. Users can create a bridge between Postman and AWS API Gateway, requiring an Access Key ID and Secret Access Key from their AWS account, to manage API lifecycles effectively. This setup enables users to deploy APIs across different stages, such as development or production, and export Postman Collections from AWS API Gateway for further API calls. The integration enhances the ability to design APIs using Postman's API Builder, automatically syncing details to AWS API Gateway, thus fostering a tighter integration between Postman and AWS, and improving the delivery of APIs using existing cloud infrastructure.

Postman Galaxy is a global, virtual API conference that took place from February 2 to 4, 2021, bringing together API enthusiasts from around the world for an engaging online experience. The event featured keynote presentations and announcements from Postman's founders and product teams, along with breakout sessions led by industry experts and innovative customers. Attendees also had the opportunity to participate in interactive, hands-on training workshops, making it a comprehensive event for learning and networking in the API community.