I am giving a presentation to my friend Ken Bauer Favel’s (@ ken_bauer) class of computer science sutdents at Tecnológico de Monterrey (@TecDeMonterrey) tomorrow, and I wanted to prepare an overview of what I am going to be talking about, and share some links for the students to follow. I am doing more workshops with students recently as part of Postman student outreach, and Ken’s class is exactly the target audience we are interested in reaching. These are young minds who are just getting started in their careers and they should be aware of APIs, how to put them to work, but more importantly making sure they are fully tested and reliable for consumers, and the applications that are built on them.
Ken’s class is all about software quality and testing, so I figured I would take a look at how APIs can be defined, versioned, managed, and tested. I’ll be showing them the process using Postman, which is a ubiquitous tool for developers within the enterprise but the concepts I’ll demonstrate are universal an something the students can apply using different tooling, using any HTTP API. Here are the building blocks of what I’ll be walking them through, with some links to help them get primed if they have the time.
- API 101 - A quick refresh about what APIs are, and acknowledging they are behind every technological shift of the last 20 years.
- History of APIs - A quick look at how we got here, and the role that APIs play in modern software development.
- Introduction to Postman - Learning about how Postman can be used to make calls to web APIs without writing code.
- OpenAPI (formerly known as Swagger) - Looking at how OpenAPI can be used as the contract for each API, providing a machine readable definition for each API.
- API Authorization - Taking a moment to understand how APIs employ authentication, and how Postman can help you apply common forms of authentication.
- Postman Collections - Understanding how to save API requests as collections, so that they can be used for many different purposes in the future, while developing, testing, and consuming APIs.
- Scripting in Postman - Taking collections to the next level by adding pre-request or test scripts that can be used to test the contract of each API being developed.
- Running Collections - How you run your collections using runners, monitors, or in the command line, helping make sure your APIs are always delivering as expected.
I will leave the rest of the conversation open ended, letting students ask questions, then dive deeper into each of these areas, or go in other directions that might help them build better software using APIs. If they want to follow along, the students should have Postman downloaded, so that they can play with the platform as I am working my way through examples. If they are feeling adventurous ahead of time, they can use this collection:
