Join Kevin Swiber, API Lifecycle and Platform Strategist at Postman, on September 8th, 2022 at 10:00am Pacific Time forHow to Manage Complexity Across the API Lifecycle, | | |  a live online event hosted by the Cisco Developer Relations team!

If you're developing with APIs -and who isn't? -then you need a tool to test how the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) you want to use actually work. Postman is a fantastic tool for that. It's a browser-based client that tests HTTP requests in a graphical user interface, and provides responses from APIs under test that you can use to help build applications.

Here at Cisco, our Developer Experience team has been collaborating with Postman since the early days of DevNet in 2017. We appreciate what Postman offers and how it has played a significant role in helping educate and inspire our developer community and our business partners. The tool has enabled our team to build interactive educational materials, like our Coding & API Learning Labs, to help people quickly get hands-on with our own APIs. Thanks to Postman, developers and customers can get more value from Cisco APIs quickly, and can solve business problems efficiently.

We want to help you learn about Postman, and not just because it helps you use our own Cisco APIs. It really is an important tool for all developers.

Who Uses This Universal API Tool

Postman is an API client that makes it easy for developers to create, share, test, and document APIs.  In the Cisco Developer Experience team, developers use Cisco APIs to build complex IoT (Internet of Things), enterprise, and mobile solutions. DevOps engineers investigate ways to use Cisco APIs in automating workflows, and in coupling microservices and systems together. All of these teams use Postman.

With the rise in API adoption in networks, many network engineers have adopted NetDevOps tools. It is great to see teams looking at developing a strategy of API-first development, or planning the API roadmap to address reliability obstacles before they occur.

Getting Started

Getting to "Hello World" is a great first step that shows how our APIs work, and Postman makes it easy: See our Cisco SD-WAN Learning Lab to get there yourself. DevNet's developer experience team works hard to outline potential use cases and then help developers quickly make progress on their solutions. While we can all learn by studying API documentation in instruction format, developers like me often want to learn by implementing. So we provide a collection of API calls accessible via Postman that can get devs started fast  We ensure that our Postman collections are kept current and relevant, to make them useful in production as well as education. For example, when we launched the latest SD-WAN Sandbox and API documentation, we updated and created a new Postman collection just for it.

Meet an API Wizard

I encourage you to join us on September 8, 2022, at 10am Pacific Time for a live webinar: "How to Manage Complexity Across the API Lifecycle," with Kevin Swiber from Postman. This session will address the challenge of managing the increasing complexity of APIs. It will present a solution to implement mindful practices through each stage of the API Lifecycle.

We'll cover core topics like:

• Production API design techniques
• What to do about versioning
• How to implement governance, and
• The must-haves of observability.

Kevin is Postman's API Lifecycle and Platform Strategist. He's a software engineering, architecture, and developer tools advocate, and had been focused on distributed systems and APIs for more than a decade. Kevin has career has spanned enterprise developer and the API Management space. He's worked at a number of API product companies, including Apigee (acquired by Google Cloud Platform) and now Postman, where he collaborates with both industry and enterprise companies on building a platform strategy across the entire API Lifecycle. He is also the Marketing Chair for the OpenAPI Initiative.

Don't miss what is going to be an incredibly informative and education session with a real expert in the field! Join me by signing up for this event now!

Your Homework

As I said, Cisco's Developer Experience team has built  one of the biggest Postman collections, which can help users get to their first meaningful interactions with a Cisco API.

The  Postman Collections are Executable API Descriptions. Postman's collection folders make it easy to keep the API requests and elements organized per platform, based on Cisco's APIs and functions.

For even more background, check out the online seminar I gave recently on how Cisco Developer Experience builds our API content with Postman, at the Postman Galaxy conference. Check it out!

Now read:

• How Cisco DevNet Runs Developer Education -Postman Galaxy session
• Cisco DevNet Runs Interactive Developer Education on Postman
• New SD-WAN Sandboxes and Postman Collections...Try Them Now
• New DevNet Postman Collection Makes Using APIs Easier

We'd love to hear what you think. Ask a question or leave a comment below.
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