If A Search For Swagger or OpenAPI Doesn't Yield Results I Try For A Postman Collection

While profiling any company, a couple of the Google searches I will execute right away are for “[Company Name] Swagger” and “[Company Name] OpenAPI”, hoping that a provide is progressive enough to have published an OpenAPI definition–saving me hours of work understanding what their API does. I’ve added a third search to my toolbox, if these other two searches do not yield results, searching for “[Company Name] Postman”, revealing whether or not a company has published a Postman Collection for their API–another sign of a progressive, outward thinking API provider in my book.

A machine readable definition for an API tells me more about what a company, organization, institution, or government agency does, than anything else I can dig up on their website, or social media profiles. An OpenAPI definition or Postman Collection is a much more honest view of what an organization does, than the marketing blah blah that is often available on a website. Making machine readable definitions something I look for almost immediately, and prioritize profiling, reviewing, and understanding the entities I come across with a machine readable definition, over those that do not. I only have so much time in a day, and I will prioritize an entity with an OpenAPI or Postman, over those who do not.

The presence of an OpenAPI and / or Postman Collection isn’t just about believing in the tooling benefits these definitions provide. It is about API providers thinking externally about their API consumers. I’ve met a lot of API providers who are dismissive of these machine readable definitions as trends, which demonstrates they aren’t paying attention to the wider API space, and aren’t thinking about how they can make their API consumers lives easier–they are focused on doing what they do. In my experience these API programs tend to not grow as fast, focus on the needs of their integrators and consumers, and often get shut down after they don’t get the results they thought they’d see. APIs are all about having that outward focus, and the presence of OpenAPI and Postman Collection are a sign that a provider is looking outward.

While I’m heavily invested in OpenAPI (I am member), I’m also invested in Postman. More importantly, I’m invested in supporting well defined APIs that provide solutions to developers. When an API has an OpenAPI for delivering mocks, documentation, testing, monitoring, and other solutions, and they provide a Postman Collection that allows you to get up an running making API calls in seconds or minutes, instead of hours or days–it is an API I want to know more about. Making these potential searches the deciding factor between whether or not I will continue profiling and reviewing an API, or just flagging it for future consideration, and moving on to the next API in the queue. I can’t keep up with the number of APIs I have in my queue, and it is signals like this that help me prioritize my world, and get my work done on a regular basis.