Getting Our Schema In Order With Postman's New Data Editor

In 2017 I think that getting our act together when it comes to our data schema will prove to be just as important as getting it together when it comes to our API definitions and design. This is one reason I'm such a big fan of using OpenAPI to define our APIs because it allows us to better organize the schema of the data included as part of the API request and response structure. So I am happy to see Postman announce their new data editor, something I'm hoping will help us make sense of the schema we are using throughout our API operations.

The Postman data editor provides us with some pretty slick data management UI features including drag and drop, a wealth of useful keyboard shortcuts, bulk actions, and other timesaving features. Postman has gone a long way to inject awareness into how we are using APIs over the last couple of years, and the data editor will only continue developing this awareness when it comes to the data we are passing back and forth. Lord knows we need all the help we can get when it comes to getting our data backends in order.

The Postman data editor makes me happy, but I'm most optimistic about what it will enable, and what Postman has planned as part of their roadmap. They end their announcement with "we have a LOT of new feature releases planned to build on top of this editor, capabilities inspired by things you already do using spreadsheets". For me, this points to some features that would directly map to the most ubiquitous data tools out there--the spreadsheet. With a significant portion of business in the world is done via spreadsheets, it makes the concept of integration into the API toolchain a pretty compelling thing.