Focusing On Digital API Capabilities Over Just Doing APIs

As I work on creating more useful Postman collections I am distilling my API definitions down to the small possible unit as I possibly can. While I have many robust reference Postman collections and OpenAPIs, I am enjoying creating Postman collections that accomplish just a single ting—representing each digital capability that I have. Currently my digital capabilities are spread across a number of servers, GitHub repositories, and Postman workspaces. If I use one of the APIs in my long list of API providers it is pretty common that I use less than 5% of the API paths from each individual providers. So, other than for sharing as part of my API Evangelist research, why do I need to wade through entire reference API collections to get at the one or two capabilities I need to actually use.

I’m slowly working through the stack of APIs that I use, pulling out the different capabilities I put to work as part of my API Evangelist work, defining as single Postman collections that I list on my GitHub capabilities page. I have published two Twitter API capabilities I have defined, which I will be expanding on pretty quickly, helping document all of the essential API calls I make to the Twitter platform.

Twitter

Tweet Search A basic search for Tweets on Twitter by query. Run in Postman
Twitter Account Status Doing a lookup on users and returning only the fields that describe their status. Run in Postman

I have probably another 50 individual Twitter platform capabilities I am putting to work across my platform. I am going to list them all out here, and then begin documenting how I put each of these capabilities to work. Then I’m going to evaluate whether there is any opportunity for me to scale each capabilities using Postman monitors, helping me automate the orchestration of Twitter data across my operations. Next, I got to work defining a handful of GitHub capabilities I put to use on a regular basis.

GitHub

Search Code Searches GitHub for code, using a specific query. Run in Postman
Search Issues Searches GitHub for issues, using a specific query. Run in Postman
Search Repositories Searches GitHub for repositories, using a specific query. Run in Postman
Search Users Searches GitHub for users, using a specific query. Run in Postman
GitHub Public Events Lists public events for a GitHub user account. Run in Postman
GitHub Organization Events List public events for a GitHub organization. Run in Postman
GitHub List Organization Members List the members for a GitHub organization. Run in Postman

I have probably 50+ other GitHub capabilities I put to use on a regular basis. I am having to seriously reconsider how I use GitHub after the migration of my data API projects and websites off GitHub a couple of months, and migration of API management to the Postman platform. The process of distilling each individual GitHub API that I use down to a single Postman API capability collection is helping me think through how I use the platform, and get more organized when it comes to observing and regularly evaluate how I use GitHub.

Ultimately I am going to end up with a mess of individual Postman collections I am going to need to manage. This is fine, because I am building Postman collections to help me automate and govern all of my Postman collections. I’m purposely looking to scale the number of APIs and derivative Postman collections I have to manage to push my skills when it comes to automating things with Postman. Focusing more on digital API capabilities over just simply doing APIs is helping me be more thoughtful and critical about how I put APIs to work, while being more precise in how I define API Evangelist capabilities.