May 2021 Summaries

Breaking Changes is a new weekly talk show launching in early June, hosted by Postman Chief Evangelist Kin Lane, that explores critical developments in the API-driven industry. The show features discussions with prominent figures from the API world, such as Alex Reynolds from Shutterstock and Lorinda Brandon from BetterCloud, who share their insights and experiences on API design, architecture, and strategy. Viewers can expect to gain valuable knowledge on the latest API trends, learn from the journeys of various practitioners and organizations, and discover innovative approaches to enhancing developer experiences. The first episode, airing on June 9, will focus on "Transforming Your Business Through APIs" with Alex Reynolds as a guest speaker.

Symbl.ai, a conversation intelligence platform for developers, has launched a public workspace on Postman to facilitate exploration and testing of its APIs, which are primarily designed to enhance real-time communication experiences through connections, transformations, or visualizations. The workspace enables developers to experiment with APIs for uploading and processing voice, video, or text messages in bulk, as well as to utilize the new Management API for creating custom vocabularies and the Conversation APIs for analyzing conversation data. Symbl.ai's initiative aims to reduce the "Time to First API Call" by making it easier for developers to make their first successful API call and create cross-API playgrounds. Partnering with Dolby.io, Symbl.ai has also co-released a collaborative workspace for transcribing meetings, and the company has been recognized by Postman as a startup to watch for its potential industry impact. Symbl.ai encourages developers to share their customized workspaces and offers support through its Slack channel and email.

The Exploratory is a new video series from Postman designed to offer viewers a deeper understanding of various Postman topics through brief videos of around 10 minutes or less. These videos, which are ideal for leisurely browsing, come with interactive examples and additional resources to facilitate hands-on learning. Viewers can refine their existing skills or acquire new ones while exploring Postman's functionalities. The Exploratory series is available on the Postman YouTube Channel, featuring topics such as API Documentation, API Monitoring, and Public Workspaces, with opportunities for viewers to suggest future content ideas in the comments.

In a detailed exploration of API testing, the importance of both positive and negative test scenarios is highlighted to ensure the resilience of applications. The text discusses the concept of "happy paths," where user interactions proceed as intended, versus "unhappy paths," which involve unintended behaviors and inputs that can break a system. It emphasizes that while developers typically focus on happy path scenarios, negative testing—where expected errors confirm robust error handling—is crucial for identifying and addressing vulnerabilities before they cause system failures. The "How to Break an API" livestream serves as a practical example of testing both positive and negative scenarios using the Unbreakable API Lite, demonstrating how engineers and testers can use Postman to simulate and automate these tests. This approach encourages the proactive identification of edge cases that could compromise API functionality, ultimately promoting a culture of resilience in software development.

Danny Dainton, a senior quality engineer at Postman, is renowned for his contributions to the tester community, particularly through his open-source npm package, htmlextra. This HTML reporter, designed for Postman’s Newman command line collection runner, has achieved over 2 million downloads since its 2018 release. Dainton, who learned his technical skills through practical experience and free online resources, created htmlextra during a hackathon to enhance the default Postman HTML reporter by offering more detailed and stylistically improved reports. His journey from military background to open-source contributor highlights a commitment to community engagement, as he spends considerable time assisting others online and encourages participation in open-source projects. Despite limited formal education in technology, Dainton’s willingness to learn and adapt has driven the success of htmlextra, which is now utilized by diverse organizations, including the UK's National Health Service. His story underscores the power of passion and community support in open-source development, as well as the importance of contributing to and learning from shared resources.

As a technical community manager at Postman, the author highlights the vibrant and supportive nature of the Postman Community forum, which serves as a hybrid between community and support forums, fostering peer-to-peer interactions and voluntary assistance from employees. The forum caters to a variety of participants, ranging from first-timers and help seekers to casual contributors and highly involved regulars, each playing a crucial role in maintaining the forum's ecosystem. The forum offers a space for users to seek help, share knowledge, and build relationships, with different participation archetypes contributing to its dynamic environment. The Postman Community encourages personal growth, skill enhancement, and connection-building, as members engage at their own pace, benefiting both from receiving and providing assistance, and ultimately strengthening the sense of community.

Postman's integration with Datadog, now part of the Datadog Technology Partner program, allows users to seamlessly send monitor run results to Datadog for further analysis, with the integration accessible directly on the Datadog platform, which supports over 450 built-in integrations. Recent updates to the integration include offering unlimited metrics on Datadog, as opposed to the previous limitation on custom metrics, and aligning Postman metrics with standard naming conventions used by other data sources. Additionally, a default "Postman Monitor Overview" dashboard is available on Datadog, providing users with a convenient way to observe their APIs by simply adjusting the monitor_name variable. Existing users will notice a change in metric names to align with industry standards, but older integrations will continue to display metrics with their original names until users upgrade to the new integration version, as outlined in the Postman Learning Center documentation.

Matthew Reinbold has joined Postman as the director of API ecosystems at a pivotal time when the API landscape is rapidly evolving. The proliferation of web APIs in modern software development has led to increased complexity, requiring adaptable and pragmatic API ecosystem governance to manage it effectively. Postman, known for its API client and testing tool, is now a crucial platform that supports API ecosystems through features like public workspaces, collaboration, versioning, and enterprise control management. Reinbold joins the Postman Open Technologies team, committed to enhancing open specifications, standards, and tooling, aiming to elevate API practices from individual assets to ecosystem-level management. He is enthusiastic about helping Postman users, from small projects to large enterprises, advance their API practices and explore new opportunities within the industry.

Postman has introduced support for WebSocket APIs in its platform, now available in public beta with version 8.5 and above, addressing a highly requested feature from its community. This update allows users to establish two-way communication between the browser and web server through WebSocket APIs, offering a new asynchronous API paradigm. Users can create a WebSocket Request tab to input their API URL, establish connections, send and receive messages, and customize headers and query parameters for the connection. The platform provides detailed information on the connection process and a robust interface for composing and previewing messages with syntax highlighting and search capabilities. The unified message timeline helps users manage and filter messages efficiently, and previous sessions can be revisited and reused, facilitating collaboration in shared workspaces. Postman aims to enhance its platform by supporting WebSocket subprotocols and expanding its debugging utilities, encouraging community feedback and engagement through forums and GitHub to improve and innovate further.

Navigating the complexities of scheduling CircleCI pipelines becomes more efficient with the use of Postman, particularly through its monitoring service. Traditional methods of adjusting CircleCI pipeline schedules require manual changes to the config.yml file, followed by a series of commits, pull requests, and merges, which can be cumbersome, especially for multiple workflows. By leveraging Postman's ability to trigger CircleCI pipelines via API requests and utilizing Postman monitors, users can bypass the need for constant configuration changes, allowing for easy, fast, and flexible schedule maintenance. Postman monitors offer a graphical user interface for scheduling, enabling users to visually track monitor runs and adjust schedules without altering the CircleCI configuration, while also introducing the novel capability to pause or resume pipelines, a feature not fully supported by CircleCI alone. This integration enhances the management of CI processes and testing by simplifying the scheduling process and providing greater control over pipeline executions.

Authenticated users of the Postman API can access their user information through the /me endpoint, which is useful for populating user interfaces or interacting with other systems. By making a GET request to this endpoint, users can retrieve information such as their username, full name, and email address by inspecting the response's user attribute. Users are encouraged to try this feature by executing a request in the Postman Public Workspace to see firsthand how the retrieval process works and what specific user information can be obtained.

Aanchal Mishra, a Postman Student Leader at SNDT Women’s University, shares her enriching journey with Postman Student Programs, highlighting how these initiatives empower students and mentors in the tech community. She first discovered the Postman Student Programs in January 2021 through Ali Mustufa Shaikh, a Postman Student Community Manager, and quickly became a Postman Student Expert by completing the necessary training and receiving a certification badge. Through the program, Mishra engaged with a vibrant community, participated in challenges, and attended the Postman Galaxy 2021 conference, where she interacted with prominent figures like Steve Wozniak and Dr. Ellen Ochoa. She later advanced to become a Postman Student Leader, organizing events such as an APIs 101 workshop at her campus, which led to her promotion as part of the inaugural cohort of Postman Student Leaders. Mishra emphasizes the vast opportunities and resources available through these programs, which focus on fostering API literacy and leadership skills among students, and encourages others to join and benefit from the supportive Postman community.

The Co-Win portal is an essential tool for Indians to register and schedule COVID-19 vaccinations, and due to high demand, slots fill quickly, prompting efforts to automate vaccine availability alerts. Postman professionals utilized the Postman Collection Runner to receive alerts for vaccine availability, leading to successful vaccinations. To aid others, they created a public workspace with Postman Collections, monitors, and APIs, allowing users to configure alerts based on parameters such as age, vaccine type, and doses required. These alerts can be configured through various methods, including Postman Collection Runner, Newman CLI, and Postman Monitors, and can notify through Slack and Telegram by setting up webhooks or bots. Testing and customization of alerts are supported by a mock server created with the Co-Win API's OpenAPI definition, enabling users to test workflows without live server dependencies. Contributions to the COVID-19 Vaccine Locator India workspace are encouraged, inviting users to add new collections, alerts, and visualizations, fostering collaboration to enhance the efficiency of vaccination scheduling and inspire the development of other automated solutions.

The newly introduced integration between Postman and New Relic allows DevOps specialists to efficiently monitor API and IT infrastructure metrics by sending data from Postman monitors to New Relic. This integration provides a comprehensive view of both API metrics, such as latency and error rates, and infrastructure metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption, all accessible within New Relic. By sending run-level and request-level metrics, including failed tests and total latency, Postman enables users to pivot data across various dimensions, such as region and request name, to gain insights into API performance across different geographies. Additionally, the integration supports external API monitoring, which considers client-side factors to provide a more accurate depiction of API performance, and it helps model and monitor end-to-end transactions using Postman's features for managing data and creating workflows. The integration also leverages New Relic's intelligent alerting capabilities, such as self-adjusting thresholds and anomaly detection, to promptly notify users of any issues, allowing for the creation of dashboards using New Relic Query Language (NRQL) to visualize the data effectively.

Postman has expanded its Open Technologies team by appointing Mike Ralphson as the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) lead, joining other notable experts from the AsyncAPI and JSON Schema communities. Ralphson's extensive experience with OAS, particularly through his work with the OpenAPI Initiative's Technical Steering Committee and contributions to various tooling, positions him as a key figure in enhancing API discovery and governance. His involvement with projects like APIs.guru and the Schema.org WebAPI component demonstrates his commitment to improving API lifecycle processes by standardizing API discovery and search. As a new member of the Postman team, Ralphson will not only inform the company's roadmap regarding OAS integration but also provide expertise to the Postman community, supporting the platform's 17 million developers in creating and managing APIs. His addition is expected to bolster Postman's efforts to make OAS a central element of API operations across industries, emphasizing its importance as a source of truth in enterprise API management.

Postman has launched a new 30 Days of Postman challenge aimed at developers, offering a daily tutorial and challenge over a 30-day period to earn a special badge. Participants will engage with tasks that include setting dynamic request bodies, parsing HTML responses, and using webhooks, among other API-related skills. The challenge is designed for developers, particularly novice ones, with a foundational understanding of software programming and beginner-level JavaScript or similar languages. Each day's challenge builds on prior concepts, though participants can explore topics at their own pace. Solutions are self-validated for the first 29 days, with the final challenge requiring submission to the Postman team for review. Upon successful completion, participants join a leaderboard and earn their 30 Days of Postman badge. The initiative encourages exploration of additional resources for deeper understanding and offers alternative training badges for those seeking different learning experiences.

Developers often find themselves spending more time debugging APIs than desired, with the 2020 State of the API Report by Postman highlighting a discrepancy between the ideal and actual time spent on debugging. In response, Postman has introduced features to streamline API testing and debugging, including a proxy that captures both HTTP and HTTPS traffic, the latter being a significant enhancement due to the challenges posed by HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). HSTS is a security protocol that ensures traffic is transmitted securely by requiring valid SSL certificates, which can complicate traffic inspection tools. Postman addresses this by allowing developers to install a self-signed root Certificate Authority (CA) certificate, enabling the capture of HTTPS traffic without security warnings. This new capability helps developers efficiently monitor and document API interactions, even for endpoints with HSTS enabled, by making it possible to save captured requests for further use in documentation and mock server creation.