PostCon 2019 takeaways

API developers came from silicon valley and beyond to attend the second annual POST/CON 2019 event, which has now passed. Postman users and customer presenters have shared their biggest take-ways (pasted below). The event was very successful for hundreds of attendees that work in API development offering an opportunity to learn first-hand how other enterprises and Postman users are expanding their API development. POST/CON featured special guest speaker Dr. Yvonne Cagle, acclaimed Aerospace Researcher, a keynote from Postman’s co-founder and CEO, Abhinav Asthana, as well as an impressive list of some of the technology sectors’ top thought leaders, including:

• Bear Douglas, Director of Developer Relations at Slack
• Jeff Gibson, Data Engineering Manager at Atlassian
• Felipe Freire, Coding Tester at adidas
• Stève Sfartz, API Architect at Cisco DevNet
• Daniele Bernardi, Senior Partner Engineer at Twitter
• Upkar Lidder, Developer Advocate at IBM
• Matt Cole, Senior Integration Engineer at PayPal
   

Key Takeaways of POST/CON 

Postman Features

• Testing - Testing using JavaScript within Postman is rapidly covering unit, integration, system, interface, regression, and other common types of tests that developers need, allowing them to aggregate testing into a single tool.
• Automation - Postman plays an important role at Cisco’s Devnet program when it comes to automation using bots, making it easier to define, deliver, test, and engage with automated systems that depend on local and 3rd party APIs to do what they do.
• Documentation - API providers are keeping their API documentation up to date, consistent, and providing value to API consumers, reducing friction when it comes the biggest pain point API developers face when integrating with resources.
• Authentication - Companies are reducing the challenges developers face around complex authentication processes by leveraging Postman scripts to request and refresh tokens that are used to secure APIs, and keep resources safe.
• Mocking - Companies are able to speed up the development APIs and the applications that use them by encouraging API developers to mock their APIs as they are being developed, providing web, mobile, and device application developers with working APIs that they can use to develop against, even before APIs are ready for production.

Collaboration Platform

• Sharing - Postman increases the sharing of what API requests are possible, with collections providing a common, machine-readable, executable representation of what an API does that can be shared and executed by anyone.
• Enterprise - Moving beyond individual free tier usage of Postman can take time and investment, but it proves to be worth it when you are trying to bridge teams across large enterprises, reducing friction in how software is delivered at Kroger.
• Collaboration - The ability to collaborate across teams and not have to share JSON, code, and other technical details via email, chat, and other channels are the killer feature for Postman, enabling teams to be more efficient.
• On-Boarding - Postman is essential for helping to standardize how developers on-board within the enterprise, making sure that all APIs are discoverable and well documented highlighting the common patterns that are in use.
• Non-Developers - EasyPost is crafting API collections that are defined for use by non-developers providing common tasks for them that will help their sales and other teams be more successful in accomplishing their work each day.
• Integrations - Transposit teams are using Postman to define integrations with 3rd party SaaS solutions, and then using collections to define, test, monitor, and manage the quality of integrations their customers are dependent upon.