October 2021 Summaries

Earlier this year, Postman participated as a mentor organization in the 2021 Google Summer of Code (GSoC), focusing on projects related to AsyncAPI, OpenAPI, and Newman. Nine students, alongside 17 Postman team members, collaborated on nine projects aimed at enhancing tooling and specifications for asynchronous and RESTful APIs. Under the AsyncAPI Initiative, projects included the development of libraries such as Cupid for relationship diagrams, a simulation library for stress testing, a document optimizer, a diff generator, and a chatbot to aid new users. The OpenAPI Initiative saw contributions in API conversion and utilities for Postman Public Workspaces. For Newman, Postman's CLI tool, projects included a web dashboard for managing Newman runs and a command for executing single requests with detailed feedback. The event celebrated significant contributions from students globally, setting the stage for future GSoC engagements.

APIs are driving innovation in the financial technology sector, particularly in the realm of digital payments, as highlighted by Postman's featured list of top payment APIs. These APIs, including those from Stripe, Brex, Dwolla, Yodlee, and Finix, offer developers the tools to manage payments, process transactions, and aggregate financial data. Stripe supports a wide range of payment solutions for various businesses, while Brex provides APIs for financial management tailored to tech companies. Dwolla connects businesses to banking networks for money transfers and account verification, Yodlee aggregates diverse financial data for a unified view, and Finix enables large businesses to handle their own payment processing. Each company offers accessible API documentation through public workspaces, encouraging developers to explore and integrate these tools into their applications, thus enhancing the capabilities and efficiency of financial operations.

APIs play a crucial role in facilitating communication between applications and enhancing user interaction, as highlighted in Postman's featured list of APIs that power the future of communications. This list showcases a variety of APIs from companies such as Feishu, Nylas, Klaviyo, Meta, and Lob, each offering unique capabilities like team collaboration, work automation, marketing campaign messaging, business communication, and direct mail workflow management. Developers are encouraged to integrate these APIs into their toolkits by exploring and testing them in the respective public workspaces provided. The Postman API Network offers a diverse range of APIs that enable the seamless exchange of information and news, inviting users to learn, explore, and contribute their own recommendations.

Episode 19 of the Breaking Changes podcast, featuring Skyflow Co-founder and CEO Anshu Sharma, delves into the role of APIs in enhancing privacy, security, and compliance in software development. Sharma emphasizes the shift of personally identifiable information (PII) from being an asset to a liability and advocates for using APIs to abstract PII, allowing developers to focus on app development while offloading privacy concerns to secure data vaults. He argues that APIs, similar to how Stripe and Twilio have revolutionized payments and communication, can democratize access to sophisticated privacy solutions, leveling the playing field between small and large companies. Sharma underscores the importance of privacy-respecting business models, suggesting that future revenue generation lies in earning users' trust rather than selling their data. The conversation highlights Skyflow's work with U.S. Health and Human Services during the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrating how APIs can facilitate secure data sharing without compromising privacy. Overall, the discussion reinforces the potential of APIs to balance privacy, security, and accessibility in a digital economy, positioning them as crucial for the future of global commerce.

With Halloween approaching, some individuals are channeling their fears into creative projects by utilizing various APIs for unique side endeavors. These include accessing municipal data to create safety notification systems or maps of urban cleanliness, using home automation APIs to control atmospheric lighting for a spooky ambiance, exploring public movie databases to curate horror-themed watchlists, and developing fortune-telling applications with Tarot Card APIs. Additionally, enthusiasts can delve into the world of the supernatural by scraping data from websites like the Paranormal Database to create their own APIs, or by using computer vision to enhance predictions. For those inspired by these ideas, the Postman API Network offers further opportunities to transform datasets into engaging projects and to share these creations with a broader community.

Postman has updated its workspaces to enhance collaborative workflows by introducing roles that define user capabilities within a workspace. The new roles include Workspace Admin, Workspace Editor, and Workspace Viewer, each offering different levels of access and interaction with workspace elements. This update eliminates the need to join a workspace before taking action, allowing users to quickly engage with the workspace. Users can now fork collections and environments to make edits and contribute back, even if they hold only a viewer role. Elements are restricted to a single workspace to ensure clarity in management. The updates aim to streamline collaboration and encourage user feedback through Postman's community channels.

In a data-driven decision-making landscape, Postman has revamped its reporting functionality to enhance organizations' ability to monitor and gain insights into their API landscape. The updated reports provide users with comprehensive metrics on team performance, API usage, and security, enabling them to track activities such as forks, comments, and pull requests. These reports are categorized into Summary, Team Details, All Workspaces, All APIs, and Security Audit, allowing for a holistic view of organizational API activity. The integration of drill-down panes enables users to explore data more granularly, facilitating actionable insights. The redesign aligns with the Postman experience and aims to streamline API management, with plans for further enhancements to optimize team and API performance.

Postman has introduced a new feature allowing users to save and document WebSocket requests within collections, enhancing the tool's ability to handle both synchronous and asynchronous protocols. This update, a response to popular demand, enables users to create dedicated collections for WebSocket requests and store accompanying messages with meaningful names. It also automatically generates API documentation from saved requests and messages, with Socket.IO requests benefiting from categorized event-based documentation. This development marks the first step toward better integrating asynchronous APIs into the API lifecycle, with plans to add features like scripting, testing, and forking. Users are encouraged to provide feedback through the Postman Community forum and GitHub issue tracker to help refine these tools further.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be made more accessible through the use of various APIs, as showcased in Postman's latest featured list, "Artificial Intelligence APIs." These APIs are hosted in public workspaces and include notable offerings such as OpenAI's Codex for natural language code translation, Rasa for building conversational assistants, Mist AI for enhancing client-to-cloud networks, Symbl for real-time data analysis from conversations, Oracle's Anomaly Detection API for identifying irregularities in data, and Rev's speech-to-text functionalities. Each API provides unique capabilities to streamline and enhance digital processes across industries, and developers are encouraged to integrate these tools into their workflows by exploring the public workspaces available on Postman’s platform.

Developers often need to perform asynchronous operations to improve code execution time by handling multiple network or I/O requests simultaneously, unlike synchronous operations that execute sequentially and block further code execution. Postman facilitates asynchronous requests by utilizing its PM API, allowing users to write scripts that chain multiple requests and control their execution order. An example use case involves researching cryptocurrency data from Coingecko's API, which requires fetching a list of crypto coins, market data, and exchanges, and then processing this data before making a final request. By forking the Async Operations collection in Postman, developers can execute parallel requests using async.parallel to obtain data from the necessary endpoints and build a POST request payload. This approach demonstrates the capability of Postman's scripting features to address common challenges in executing complex workflows, highlighting additional operations available such as async.series and async.race, which further enhance the flexibility and efficiency of asynchronous operations.

In a conversation with Sam Ramji, chief strategy officer at DataStax, on the podcast "Breaking Changes," the discussion centered on the evolution of data and APIs, the transformation in team dynamics, and the role of machine learning in enhancing team capabilities. Ramji emphasized that modern teams can now become resilient and leverage the intelligence promised by API-driven data infrastructure, which has reached a level of maturity to deliver on its potential. The episode is part of a broader series accessible on multiple platforms, including Spotify and YouTube.

Postman has been recognized as a Visionary in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management, highlighting its Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. This recognition aligns with Postman’s vision of an API-first world, where organizations use a consistent development model to efficiently design, develop, deliver, test, and iterate on APIs. Postman has gained traction in enterprise environments, initially solving challenges for API consumers and later addressing the needs of API producers. The platform emphasizes collaboration, discovery, and communication, which accelerates adoption and supports the evolution of internal microservices and external partner expansion. With the release of Postman v9 and plans for v10, the company remains committed to optimizing the API lifecycle by integrating with existing enterprise tools and adapting to a multi-API-gateway environment. Postman’s efforts are validated by the 2021 Gartner Hype Cycle for APIs and Business Ecosystems, which aligns with the platform's capabilities in areas such as API security testing, standards, and ecosystem management. The company continues to focus on empowering customers with productivity, quality, and governance across API operations, using Postman Collections as a foundational element in the growing API economy.

Manuel Roque, a software engineer at Stipop, outlines the process of accessing and testing the Stipop Sticker API using Postman's public workspace, which allows developers to explore its capabilities before integration. The Stipop platform offers over 150,000 stickers in multiple languages, accessible via an API that requires an API key obtained through the Stipop Dashboard. Users can fork the collection in Postman, set up authorization by inputting the API key, and test endpoints, such as the "sticker search" function, which acts as a search engine for stickers. By entering keywords, users can retrieve related stickers, with the example showcasing stickers that say "hello" in different languages. The guide emphasizes the simplicity of testing API endpoints in Postman and encourages users to reach out with any questions or feedback.

Postman's organizational structure leverages foundation teams and a Squad model to balance the advantages and challenges of centralized and decentralized systems, aiming to enhance speed and efficiency in decision-making and product development. Foundation teams provide essential services and governance to support Squads, allowing them to focus on building user-oriented products without getting bogged down by overwhelming decisions. Inspired by Amazon's two-pizza rule and Spotify's Squad model, Postman creates domain-driven boundaries for its Squads, using principles of domain-driven design to guide their formation and functioning. To address system-level dependencies and enhance infrastructure management, Postman is working towards treating infrastructure as a product, focusing on generic use cases that cover the majority of their consumer base. Despite current challenges, this approach aims to streamline internal processes and improve overall organizational efficiency while acknowledging that both foundation teams and Squads share the responsibility of catering to organizational dependencies.

Postman Intergalactic is a newly launched role-based training series offering hands-on learning experiences, initially streamed live and then available on demand. This series has created content for developers, DevOps practitioners, API producers, and most recently, testers, highlighting the importance of API testing in Postman. Two episodes are dedicated to providing a solid foundation in API testing, with the first session titled "Postman: An Introduction for Testers" offering an overview of basic and advanced testing techniques. The series allows participants to engage with the material through various means, such as forking collections from the Postman Intergalactic public workspace, watching video walkthroughs, and downloading slide decks. Upcoming sessions include the "API Publishers Series" on October 6 and October 20, focusing on documentation and increasing public API adoption. Users can register and stay updated on future sessions via notifications on the series home page.