Announcing the “Visualize for the Prize” Student Hackathon Winners

This past weekend, on August 7-8, 2021, we hosted the inaugural Postman Student Summit. Thousands of students, educators, and API enthusiasts across the globe registered for a momentous two-day celebration of APIs.

As an exciting lead-up to the online summit, Postman held the “Visualize for the Prize” hackathon to showcase student talent and creativity in the world of APIs. From July 14-28, participants had two weeks to use Postman’s visualizer feature in order to take data returned from an API of their choice and bring it to life in engaging ways.

For many participants, it was their first time using Postman Visualizer to make their brilliant projects even more impressive. Throughout the hackathon, lively office hours saw students not only proactively seeking guidance from the Postman team but also helping each other in the collaborative Postman Student Community Discord. The resulting projects were innovative and eye-catching.

After reviewing all the incredible international submissions, we are pleased to announce the winners of the “Visualize for the Prize” student hackathon and their standout projects.

Champion: chosen by Postman

Omkar Agrawal (University of Mumbai)

 

 

 

 

Winning project: “News – Catchup”

• View on Devpost
• View Postman Collection

Project summary: “News – Catchup” aggregates developer news from various sources in a beautifully styled display.

Project highlights: Omkar triumphed over several technical challenges in this project. He worked hard to optimize the user experience by adding ‘lazy loading’ in his visualization, which involved deploying his own scripts to a content delivery network (CDN). The visualization works not only with three real-world data sources, but can also serve cached data using a Postman mock server. His collection is thoroughly documented with many examples, and his video concisely showcases all the features. Plus, we love the sleek and uniform custom styling.

Prizes awarded:

• 45-minute one-on-one career mentoring session with a Postman employee in the field of their interest
• Raspberry Pi 4 Kit
• US$100 gift card to the Postman swag store

A word from Omkar: “This was a very intriguing hackathon. While I have been using Postman for quite a few years now, this hackathon still proved to be a great learning experience for me. I had to find out ways of doing things that I didn’t know Postman was capable of.”

Watch the project demo:

People’s Choice: chosen by peers

Abhishek Ranjan (B.I.T. Sindri)

 

 

 

 

Winning project: “peuplé”

• View on Devpost
• View Postman Collection

Project summary: “Peuplé” displays information about the world’s 10 most populated cities on an interactive map.

Project highlights: Abhishek built and deployed a custom API to deliver the GeoJSON data for his map visualization. When it comes to geo-data, it is far easier for humans to understand a map than a list of coordinates in a JSON object. Abhishek added further value by allowing a draggable and zoomable map interface, and even a little bonus trivia about each city. His demo video clearly highlights all the features.

Prize awarded:

• US$100 gift card to the Postman swag store

A word from Abhishek: “Postman Visualizer is adding some great value to the response and making the work more sensible and lovable. Also, let me thank this hackathon because it introduced me to this visualization feature, which I will use in all my API development works henceforth.”

Watch the project demo:

See all submissions

Congratulations to all participants who collectively pushed themselves to learn a new technology and build frontend data views in Postman. You can explore and comment on the wide range of creative hackathon submissions on Devpost here.

You can visualize too

Visualizations add value and understanding to data. Imagine you are a decision-maker presented with some data from an API. Would you rather scroll through thousands of lines of JSON until your eyes hurt, or glance at a beautiful chart that summarizes the trends?

If you’re curious how to make your own visualizations in Postman, learn how to get started in Postman’s Learning Center. Need inspiration? Check out the samples and templates in our public workspace of visualizer examples. We look forward to seeing how you’ll make data make sense!