March 2022 Summaries

Philip Myers, a senior software developer at SageSure, discusses the company's innovative approach to homeowners insurance in disaster-prone areas, highlighting their unique model of designing and filing their own insurance products. SageSure employs a robust continuous delivery pipeline using tools like the Postman API Platform to ensure frequent, small deployments with no service downtime, enhancing reliability and user experience. The company prioritizes comprehensive automated testing to validate new features and maintain existing functionalities, thus enabling rapid issue resolution and minimizing bugs. This methodology not only improves overall service quality but also provides a better work-life balance for the development team. SageSure's investment in advanced deployment processes underscores their commitment to customer-centricity and operational efficiency.

In a recent Postman livestream featuring Twilio Principal Software Engineer Miguel Grinberg, the discussion centered around utilizing the newly released Twilio Live API to create an interactive audio and video livestreaming experience. While Twilio is widely recognized for its SMS messaging API, it offers a broad range of communication APIs accessible in their public workspace on Postman. During the session, Grinberg, known for his expertise in Python and Flask, opted to work with Node.js and Postman, demonstrating how to invite live viewers to join a separate, audio-free livestream, which humorously resulted in a "mime" stream. Viewers were encouraged to follow along with the provided resources, such as forking the example video application code from GitHub and referencing the Twilio Live API from Postman. The livestream highlights were shared, and audiences were invited to tune into Postman's regular weekly streams on platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and LinkedIn for future events.

Understanding and testing APIs is crucial for web application developers, particularly in scenarios where issues arise during user interactions, such as a customer login flow in an e-commerce application. Postman's proxy feature allows developers to intercept and analyze the traffic between a web app's frontend and backend, facilitating clear-box testing. By capturing HTTP traffic during a debugging session, developers can perform root cause analysis (RCA) and collaborate with teammates to identify and troubleshoot issues like unusually high response times or sizes for specific user IDs. Once the problem is identified, the session can be shared within the Postman workspace, enabling developers to replay requests and efficiently resolve the issue. To prevent future occurrences, developers can save the proxy session as a collection, incorporate automated test cases, and integrate these into their CI/CD pipeline using Postman's CLI tool, Newman, ensuring ongoing regression testing as the application evolves.

Postman is set to launch an API Lab at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani) in India by December 2022, as part of its initiative to enhance API literacy among students and aspiring developers. This lab will provide students with resources such as state-of-the-art computers and servers to foster API skills, which are increasingly essential in engineering roles. The initiative is part of Postman's Student Programs, aiming to empower students with valuable skills before graduation. This collaboration with BITS Pilani, where Postman co-founders Abhinav Asthana and Abhijit Kane are alumni, also includes a classroom program to integrate API education into the curriculum. Thousands of students have already benefited, earning the Postman Student Expert badge. Abhinav Asthana emphasizes that this partnership is a step towards realizing an API-first world, equipping students to thrive in the competitive job market. BITS Pilani's vice-chancellor, Professor Souvik Bhattacharyya, praised the generosity of Postman's co-founders and foresees the API Lab as a catalyst for innovation and startups at the institution.

In a recent Postman livestream, Dr. Gleb Bahmutov, the senior director of engineering at Mercari and former VP of engineering at Cypress, demonstrated the integration of frontend and API tests using Cypress and Postman within a CircleCI continuous integration pipeline. As a prominent instructor on Cypress technology, Dr. Bahmutov emphasized the critical role of testing in modern software development, asserting that developers should also see themselves as testers. The session included practical demonstrations, such as using the Interceptor to proxy network calls and configuring tests in CircleCI, and encouraged viewers to follow along using resources like GitHub and Postman. Postman continues to engage with its community through weekly livestreams on platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and LinkedIn, inviting participation and interaction from its audience.

In today's data-rich environment, organizations seek efficient ways to harness insights from their vast data resources, and the Public API Network's Data Analytics category offers a selection of high-quality APIs to streamline this process. Among the standout options is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure REST APIs, which facilitate the integration of enterprise data with advanced data science tools for seamless processing, model management, and deployment. FIWARE provides an open-source toolkit for creating smart data solutions with reliable data access and collaboration. Cisco DevNet offers a platform that combines big data and model-driven APIs for scalable network operations automation, fostering an innovative application ecosystem. Stackby merges spreadsheet and database functionalities in a collaborative workspace, allowing the automation of workflows through third-party services. HarperDB delivers a powerful hybrid SQL and NoSQL solution, enabling complex data operations via REST API. These APIs present diverse opportunities for simplifying data analytics and are accessible for exploration and integration through platforms like Postman.

API producers face the challenge of effectively communicating their APIs' functionality to a diverse audience of consumers, including those from non-technical backgrounds like QA, DevOps, and product teams. To address this, Postman offers an automated solution that generates comprehensive reference documentation from OpenAPI 3.0 definitions, facilitating easier understanding and quicker onboarding for users. This documentation, integrated into every stage of the API lifecycle, provides detailed insights into API operations, parameters, request bodies, and responses, reducing the likelihood of user errors and enhancing the usability of APIs. Postman's approach emphasizes collaboration and accessibility, with the documentation being shareable through workspaces and the API Network. While currently limited to OpenAPI 3.0, Postman seeks to expand this feature to additional specification formats, inviting feedback from users to inform future developments.

In celebration of Women's History Month, a public workspace has been created to showcase influential women in tech and address ongoing workplace issues faced by women across industries. The workspace includes four collections, each utilizing Postman Visualizers to make data more accessible. The collections cover industry trailblazers using the Pantheon Wikipedia explorer API, gender pay gap information from the OECD's Gender Indicators dataset, parental leave policies with data from the OECD and US universities, and film dialogue by gender, highlighting disparities in representation. The workspace aims to facilitate exploration of these topics, inviting users to engage with and contribute to the datasets and visualizations through the Postman platform.

The text discusses the evolving landscape of API management, highlighting the shift from traditional API management tools to modern API platforms that integrate seamlessly with various API gateways, such as Postman and Tyk. While earlier discussions often pitted Postman against Tyk, the current enterprise reality acknowledges the complementary roles they play in API operations. Tyk is presented as a next-generation API gateway solution, offering centralized and federated approaches to API deployment, security, and management, with features like cache invalidation and health checking. The Tyk Dashboard API provides a centralized view for API operations, enabling granular control over resources, permissions, and analytics across multiple gateways. Postman is recognized for its integration capabilities with API gateways, source control, CI/CD, and APM solutions, facilitating automation and governance of API operations. The text emphasizes that API platforms represent the future of API lifecycle management, allowing enterprises to efficiently scale their API operations through modular and automated processes.

The Consumer Data Right (CDR) Rules, launched in Australia on February 6, 2022, are part of a global shift towards open banking, which allows consumers easier access and control over their financial data through standardized APIs. This movement, mirrored by similar regulations like PSD2 in Europe and FDX in the US, enables consumers to securely share their financial information with third-party services, enhancing their ability to access better financial products and services. Open banking fosters competition among banks and financial institutions, driving innovation and collaboration with fintech companies to offer tailored customer experiences. Tools like Postman support this transition by providing a platform for developing, testing, and managing open banking APIs, ensuring compliance, and promoting collaboration and visibility in the financial sector. As banks worldwide adopt open banking, they offer consumers more choice and the potential for improved financial management, while fintech companies gain opportunities to develop innovative solutions leveraging consumer data.

Communication is fundamental to organizations, encompassing customer interactions and internal exchanges through various channels such as SMS, meetings, and alerts. Integrating communication features into applications has become more efficient with the availability of ready-to-use APIs, as highlighted by Postman's new category. The Lob API offers direct mail and address verification services, enabling businesses to automate and customize physical mail delivery globally. The WhatsApp Business API, powered by Meta, facilitates secure and programmable message exchanges with clients worldwide. Twilio provides a comprehensive platform for enhancing communication through voice, text, chat, video, and email, allowing seamless integration into applications. Survey Monkey offers a free tool for collecting valuable feedback via online surveys, with APIs available for documentation, testing, and interaction. Users are encouraged to explore and utilize these APIs by incorporating them into their own workspaces using Postman.

GraphQL remains a leading query language for APIs, and Postman has bolstered its support for GraphQL by allowing automatic schema imports for GraphQL requests. This feature simplifies the process of building queries by enabling the GraphQL query editor to utilize the imported schema to offer functions like autocomplete. The automatic import of schemas is set as the default option, although users have the flexibility to opt out or use existing schemas if preferred. This enhancement aims to streamline the creation of GraphQL queries within Postman, facilitating a more efficient workflow for developers. For further insights, users are encouraged to explore resources in Postman's Learning Center or provide feedback through comments or the GitHub issue tracker.

The Public API Network offers a range of popular APIs designed to streamline and automate operations workflows, providing developers with opportunities to enhance productivity and efficiency. These APIs, which can be integrated into developers' toolkits, include Docker for container management, CircleCI for continuous integration and delivery, Humanitec for building internal developer platforms, CloudBees for automating jobs with feature management, and Vultr for cloud infrastructure management. Additionally, Oracle Cloud provides extensive API resources for enterprise applications, including a Kubernetes Playground. Each of these APIs is accessible through public workspaces, allowing developers to explore and implement these tools to automate DevOps workflows and manage infrastructure more effectively.

Founders can effectively monitor mentions of their startups on platforms like HackerNews by setting up custom alerts using Postman, allowing them to be promptly notified of discussions involving their company. This process involves configuring an API workflow within Postman, which includes setting up a series of API calls and scheduling a monitor to check HackerNews every few minutes for specific keywords related to the startup. By forking a collection from a public HackerNews workspace, founders can modify parameters such as the keyword and destination webhook, enabling notifications to be sent to platforms like Discord whenever the keyword is detected in HackerNews stories. The setup leverages Postman's features like collections, scripting with JavaScript, and monitors, which operate similarly to cron jobs, to automate the monitoring and alerting process. This approach not only applies to HackerNews but can be adapted for other social media sites and notification platforms, providing a scalable solution for tracking online mentions.

Variables play a crucial role in API development and testing in Postman, enhancing reusability, configurability, and collaboration by supporting dynamic workflows and automated testing. Unresolved variables, which occur when variables aren't defined in any active scopes, can lead to failed requests or unexpected responses because the API server expects specific values. Postman's latest update makes it easier to identify and resolve these unresolved variables, allowing users to quickly create variables or check their presence in global or active environments. This enhancement aims to improve testing efficiency and productivity by providing users with tools to debug unresolved variables and streamline the API request process.

A new member of Postman’s developer advocacy team undertook the 30 Days of Postman challenge, using the opportunity to explore the importance of data serialization in the Postman API Platform. Serialization, the process of converting complex data types into simpler ones, is crucial for data transfer between systems with varying data type compatibility. In Postman, serialization ensures that dynamic request bodies and complex data structures such as arrays and objects are properly managed when passed between requests. This process is particularly relevant when building dynamic bodies in pre-request scripts, where serialized data can be stored and retrieved efficiently using JSON.stringify() and JSON.parse(). The author’s exploration, livestreamed on Twitch, highlighted the necessity of serialization for avoiding unexpected results in applications and demonstrated its application using the Postman Echo API. The technical review for this examination was conducted by Arlemi Turpault and Shamasis Bhattacharya.

APIs, crucial for data exchange over the internet, require robust security measures to prevent data manipulation by malicious third parties, highlighting the importance of cryptography in securing data on insecure networks. Cryptography involves using mathematical algorithms to protect sensitive information, ensuring only authorized parties can access it through encryption and decryption methods. The text outlines three main types of cryptography: hash functions, which transform text into a fixed value without keys and are useful for password verification; symmetric key encryption, where the same key is used for both encryption and decryption, exemplified by AES and DES; and asymmetric key encryption, which uses a public key for encryption and a private key for decryption, as seen in algorithms like RSA. Postman, a platform for API development, facilitates the use of cryptography through various external libraries such as Crypto.js, enabling developers to apply encryption in API requests and test scripts. The discussion underscores that encrypting data significantly enhances its security compared to leaving it unprotected, urging users to explore more cryptography algorithms for diverse applications.

Arnaud Lauret, known as the API Handyman and author of "The Design of Web APIs," has joined Postman as the OpenAPI Technical Lead to further his mission of helping people understand and create APIs. With 20 years of experience in connecting software and promoting the API-first vision, Lauret has been a prominent figure in the API community, sharing his expertise through blogs, conferences, and training sessions. He has been instrumental in developing design guidelines, conducting API design reviews, and advocating for API governance. Lauret's passion for APIs aligns with Postman's commitment to supporting a global community of over 17 million users by enhancing its API platform and promoting an API-first approach. By joining Postman, he aims to make knowledge about API design, governance, and OpenAPI more accessible, ensuring that API successes are easily repeatable. Lauret invites others with a passion for APIs to explore career opportunities at Postman and contribute to the evolving API landscape.

API governance involves much more than just ensuring the consistent design of APIs; it encompasses a broader platform approach that includes discovery, reliability, consistency, delivery, and observability. Effective governance requires making APIs and their operations discoverable by default, ensuring their reliability through baseline testing, and maintaining consistency in their design across teams. The integration of these elements into existing software development lifecycles and CI/CD pipelines allows for ongoing governance rather than a one-time effort. Observability is crucial for real-time reporting and understanding of API operations, ensuring that APIs are discoverable and their health is monitored. Common challenges in API governance include a lack of discoverability, reliability, and design consistency, which can lead to significant downstream issues. A comprehensive governance strategy not only addresses these challenges but also provides a framework for managing APIs at scale, ensuring that they are delivered and iterated upon effectively.

Postman's latest release enhances collaboration by integrating Slack notifications to streamline access and modification alerts for APIs and collections. This update ensures that team members, whether requesting or granting access, receive timely notifications directly in Slack, reducing the risk of delays in workflow approval processes. Furthermore, users can now monitor changes to API definitions and collections via Slack, in addition to existing email and in-app notifications, enhancing awareness of ongoing modifications. The system's flexibility allows users to customize their notification preferences, opting in or out of specific alerts as needed, thereby optimizing team productivity and communication.

PlatformOps is emerging as a significant trend among Postman users, focusing on enhancing productivity, quality, and governance across API operations by leveraging existing infrastructure such as source control, CI/CD solutions, and API gateways. This approach builds on the principles of DevOps, DevSecOps, DataOps, and MLOps by applying them across the entire API lifecycle, acknowledging the role of API platform operators in managing and integrating various infrastructure systems. As the API management landscape becomes more complex with multiple service providers and gateways, a more API-driven platform approach is necessary to effectively manage API operations. Postman Collections have become a standardized format for defining and executing API integrations, providing a portable and shareable means of configuring, monitoring, and automating API operations. PlatformOps uses these collections to connect and optimize digital resources, enabling organizations to define and manage their infrastructure resources more effectively. By harnessing existing development workflows and tools, PlatformOps allows teams to enhance API operations without compromising on governance, thereby increasing productivity and consistency in defining, documenting, and optimizing APIs.