The results are in: The Postman API Hack, with US$100,000 in prizes up for grabs, has drawn to a close after we received an astonishing number of innovative, inspiring projects submitted from around the world. Our goal was to encourage developers, students, and hackers to work with the Postman API Platform and our new public workspaces—which we refer to as “the first massively multiplayer API experience”—and present their work to a global community. That goal was reached, and we couldn’t be more impressed.
The Hack by the numbers
We launched the hackathon on January 5, 2021, and closed submissions on January 25, 2021. During those 21 days, more than 1,900 developers from 115 countries competed. We received 274 project submissions from which three prize winners and 10 honorable mentions were selected.
The judges
The Postman API Hack winners were selected by a stellar panel of judges from across the API industry. They evaluated each submission on how the project makes developers’ lives easier, technical implementation, and creativity. Here’s our panel of brilliant judges:
Allen Helton Tyler Technologies Software Engineering Manager
Angel Rivera CircleCI Developer Advocate
Fran Mendez AsyncAPI Founder and Postman Director of Engineering
The winners were first revealed at Postman Galaxy, our recent global, virtual API conference that took place February 2-4, 2021. You can view on-demand videos of conference sessions here. Now, without further ado, let’s find out who won.
The Intergalactic Grand Prize of $25,000 cash goes to Docu-Mentor, a project whose tagline is “Documentation review, without the judgment.” The creators of Docu-Mentor are two developers from the US, Carson Hunter and Andrew DeCarlo. The Docu-Mentor workspace functions as a workspace where you can easily generate documentation for your object models and get suggestions on how your existing documentation can be improved, especially if you’re trying to keep up with many projects at once. Check out the Docu-Mentor public workspace here.
Docu-Mentor: Documentation review, without the judgment. Visit this project’s public workspace. Team Country: US
Andromeda Prize, 2nd Place: $15,000
OpenAPI Operations: A workspace that enables you to analyze and benchmark your OpenAPI specifications. Visit this project’s public workspace. Team Country: Netherlands
Nebula Prize, 3rd Place: $10,000
Webhook Debugger: Create, debug, and code your webhooks directly in Postman. Visit this project’s public workspace. Team Country: US
Moonshot Prize, Honorable Mention: $5,000 each
CoinStop: Public workspace (US) CoinStop can help you efficiently do your errands. Our API minimizes your search by finding all the nearest points of interest on your list along your subway route.
DocuSync: Public workspace (India) Sync Github’s Markdown file with Postman Documentation leveraging the power of Postman monitors.
DotCloud: Public workspace (India) DotCloud is an API that holds and provides secure access to all your project’s environment variables for authorized users or servers with a valid API token.
Quick Debug: Public workspace (Zambia) A workspace to automatically notify developers when API tests fail and suggest solutions based on the error response returned by the server.
Roku Dev Tools: Public workspace (US) A collection of useful commands and examples to aid in Roku TV development. Control your Roku device from Postman and debug and test your Roku projects within Postman.
Save the Orangutans!: Public workspace (US) We can make a difference by measuring the environmental impact of the products we buy. Using an ISBN (barcode) of a product, get statistics on the estimated environmental impact of its production.
Postcards App: personal push notifications with an API call: Public workspace (India) Postcards turn email alerts into personal push notifications to make your phone into an IoT alarm with a simple API call.
AWS Monitor: Public workspace (Germany) A set of easily customizable requests for monitoring your AWS infrastructure. You don’t have to be an AWS expert anymore to have a solid overview of what’s going with your stack.
NASA Open APIs Public Workspace: Public workspace (Chile) This public workspace helps scientists and engineers to test NASA’s Open APIs, and use them to discover awesome knowledge and innovative applications for humanity.
API Security Tester: Public workspace (US) Fast, automated, and accurate security testing of your APIs throughout the Postman lifecycle using WhiteHat Security’s Intelligence Directed DAST. Test for security vulnerabilities within Postman.
Altogether, a total of US$100,000 was awarded to 13 winning teams, and everyone who participated received a limited-edition Postman API Hack T-shirt. Thank you to the fantastic Postman community for making this a contest experience that exceeded our expectations. We look forward to hosting more events like this and can’t wait to see what you build next with the Postman API Platform.
Postman provides a wide range of functions and features to assist with API development, testing, and collaboration. Here are some commonly used functions in Postman:
Creating and Managing Requests: Postman allows you to create API requests by specifying the request method, URL, headers, parameters, and body. You can manage and organize requests within collections, including creating folders, adding descriptions, and reordering requests.
Request and Response Visualization: Postman provides a user-friendly interface to view and analyze request and response data. It supports syntax highlighting for various data formats such as JSON, XML, and HTML, making it easier to understand and validate the data.
Environment and Variables: Postman allows you to define variables and environments. Variables enable you to store and reuse dynamic values across requests, making them flexible and easy to maintain. Environments provide sets of variables specific to different environments (e.g., development, staging, production).
Tests and Assertions: Postman supports writing test scripts using JavaScript for automated API testing. You can write assertions to validate response status codes, headers, response bodies, and more. Postman's testing framework allows you to assert and validate different aspects of API responses.
Pre-request Scripts: Postman enables you to execute scripts before sending API requests using pre-request scripts. These scripts can be used to dynamically generate values, manipulate data, or set variables based on specific conditions.
Collection Runner: The Collection Runner allows you to execute a series of requests in a collection. It enables you to perform data-driven testing by iterating over multiple sets of data or environments. You can configure iterations, delays, and data sources for more comprehensive testing.
Mock Servers: Postman allows you to create mock servers for simulating API responses without a live backend. Mock servers are useful during development, allowing frontend developers to work independently by providing simulated API responses.
Documentation Generation: Postman can automatically generate documentation for your APIs based on your requests and collections. It provides a simple way to share API specifications and details with stakeholders.
Collaboration and Teamwork: Postman offers collaboration features such as sharing collections, collaborating on requests, and commenting on specific requests or collections. It also supports version control integration to manage changes and updates effectively.
Integration and Automation: Postman integrates with various tools and services, including version control systems (e.g., Git), CI/CD platforms (e.g., Jenkins), and API management solutions. It provides options for integrating with these tools to automate API testing and deployment processes.
