Cisco DevNet uses Postman to Grow Their Developer Community
Cisco designs and sells a broad range of technologies that have been powering the Internet since 1984. Across networking, security, collaboration, and the cloud, Cisco provides customers with a highly secure, intelligent platform for their digital business.
Headquartered in San Jose, California, Cisco is a worldwide leader in IT helping people connect, communicate, and collaborate. The Cisco developer relations team, DevNet, provides training and education about Cisco’s APIs to network and systems engineers, sales engineers, customers, and partners.
Postman as a powerful tool for education
One of the goals of the Cisco DevNet team is to help Cisco engineers and partners learn the latest automation capabilities of Cisco’s products and services. Postman plays a central role with both basic education about Cisco’s APIs and also in demonstrating specific Cisco technologies via online tutorials and webinars.
Postman is an easy way for network engineers to work with Cisco’s new REST API interfaces in addition to the traditional interfaces they have been using for years. With Postman, Cisco engineers and partners can experiment with the capabilities the APIs support, including how to authorize and authenticate requests and visualize every step of a user flow.
We love Postman. The Developer Relations and Developer Experience team uses it a ton for educational purposes.
[Postman] helps people conceptualize what’s going on and see the results of the API in action, without having to write any code.
Ashley Roach, Principal Engineer Evangelist
Postman for live demonstrations
Postman also plays a starring role during live demonstrations at various workshops and developer conferences. The Cisco DevNet team even teaches advanced Postman workshops, leveling up their systems and network engineers to use Postman more efficiently and effectively.
Postman is used broadly throughout the Cisco organization. “Adoption has been organic. People know Postman as a way to interact with REST APIs. It’s easy to use and super convenient,” says Principal Engineer Evangelist Ashley Roach.
Postman Collections help people learn Cisco APIs faster
Postman Collections are groups of API requests serving as workflow examples published on Cisco’s online learning platform. Customers and partners can import these collections into their local instance of the Postman app and observe the intended behavior.
“[Postman] helps people conceptualize what’s going on and see the results of the API in action, without having to write any code,” says Ashley.
Some examples:
Developer Evangelists at Cisco share collections with the broader developer community by publishing the Run in Postman button in their DevNet Learning Labs. With the Run in Postman button, Cisco shares a collection that focuses on a particular user flow designed to teach DevNet members how the technology works.
Cisco ships APIs on a constant basis, and Postman makes it easy for Cisco DevNet’s technical audience to access, learn and work with their REST APIs.By reducing the barriers to learning, Postman helps the Cisco developer community grow that much faster.
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