Announcing the Winner of Postman’s API-First Student Event for Hacktoberfest

We just wrapped up Postman’s API-first student event for Hacktoberfest—a month-long event held throughout October—during which students were given the chance to work individually or in teams to build either a spooky costume contest API or a website that consumes the API. With our Halloween Costume Contest API allowing users to create, read, update, delete, and upvote contestants in a costume contest, this challenge gave students an opportunity to practice API-first development.

What is API-first?

In the API-first approach, you define an API before writing any code for a server or frontend. For this challenge, the Postman team designed a schema that defined the routes, parameters, responses, and other traits of the costume contest API. The schema was written using the OpenAPI Specification 3.0 format, and you can view it here. Based on the schema, we used Postman to automatically generate a mock server and wrote tests so that frontend and backend teams could split up and develop in parallel.

How did students participate?

Students chose whether they wanted to build a frontend or backend, using whatever tech stack they preferred.

Frontend challenge

Students who built a frontend had to make sure their website fulfilled at least these five user stories that consume the Halloween Costume Contest API mock server:

• A user can view all contestants’ costume images in some kind of list
• A user can view all details about a single contestant
• A user can upvote individual contestants
• A user can add a contestant
• A user on a secret page can delete contestants

Backend challenge

Students who built a backend had to ensure their API server passed all the tests that check to see whether or not the schema specifications were met. The server had to enable users to:

• View all contestants
• View individual contestants
• Add a contestant
• Update a contestant
• Delete a contestant
• Upvote a contestant

Support

Throughout the month-long event, students were supported with weekly office hours hosted by the Postman team and received help from peers in the Postman Student Community Discord.

Submissions

By the end of October, we received 18 completed submissions. Some students built APIs from scratch, while others used Postman’s Code Generation beta feature to generate server boiler code from an API schema in order to jump-start their coding. Check out the students, the tech stack they used, the resulting code, and websites:

Backend projects

• Harikrushn Kanani: Node/Express/MongoDB, code
• Roshni Chauhan: Node/Express/MongoDB, code
• Aadhithyan  Suresh: Node/Express/MongoDB, code
• Sanskar Bansal: Python/Flask/SQLite, code
• Sourav Kumar Swain: Node/Express/MongoDB, code
• Simran Sahni: Node/Express/MongoDB, code
• Yashi Shukla: Node/Express/MongoDB, code
• Likita Rai: Node/Express/MySQL, code
• Bimalesh Jawahir Seth: Node/Express/MongoDB, code
• Omkar Agrawal: Node/Express/MongoDB, code
• Abduttayyeb Rampurawala: Node/Express/MongoDB, code
• Raj Khare: Node/Express/PostgreSQL, code
• Venkata Karthik Murakonda: Node/Express/MongoDB, code
• Alexander Franco: Node/Express/MongoDB, code
• Tanmay Behera: Node/Express/MongoDB, code

Frontend projects

• Harikrushn Kanani: React, code, view website
• Mohammed Safwan S.: React, code, view website
• Roshni Chauhan, Omkar Bhambure, Krushna Dahake: React, code, view website

Standout student

Harikrushn Kanani, a student from Shantilal Shah Government Engineering College, was an event superstar who submitted both the frontend and backend projects. Thanks to API-first development principles, several people were able to easily plug in Harikrushn’s API as a live backend to their website! Harikrushn reflected on the hackathon experience:

“It was a great experience to work on the Halloween Costume Contest API challenge. I had a lot of fun and learned how to build an API from a schema, and much more. The Postman Community helped me to learn and grow my skills.”

And the winner is…

In the end, all students who submitted completed projects were entered into a raffle to win a US$250 Amazon gift card. We held the digital raffle on November 1, 2021, after all completed submissions were reviewed.

We’d like to congratulate Sourav Kumar Swain from the College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneswar for completing the backend challenge and winning the raffle. You can see his project code here.

Thanks for joining us for Hacktoberfest 2021

It was exciting to see what students built using Postman’s Halloween Costume Contest API for Hacktoberfest, and we enjoyed engaging with our participants throughout the month. From debugging code during weekly Discord office hours to reviewing the amazing project submissions, we had a lot of fun (and hope you did too). Thanks to everyone who made our API-first student event for Hacktoberfest a success—we’ll see you at the next student event.