Highlights of the First-Ever Postman Student Summit

August 2021 was a remarkable month for the Postman Student Programs team because we hosted the first-ever global Postman Student Summit. The two-day conference, held August 7-8, saw more than 6,000 students and 200 educators participating from more than 100 countries. It was the world’s largest API conference for students and educators. In case you missed it, or would like a refresher, here are some memorable highlights that helped make the inaugural conference a huge success.

Day 1

Day 1 of the summit featured a fireside chat featuring Postman Co-founder and CEO Abhinav Asthana and Postman Head of Partnerships Smit Patel. This was one of the most in-demand sessions, and Abhinav shared about his journey building Postman, which first began as a weekend project to solve problems around API-driven software development. Abhinav also presented his vision for Postman’s student programs—all of which each promote API knowledge and skills among students and educators. Ultimately, he said, students today are going to build the next generation of softwares and APIs to fuel their creativity.

Day 2

Day 2 of the summit featured a kickoff talk by Postman Co-founder and CTO Ankit Sobti sharing his insights into the future of software development and APIs. To help understand the importance and future of APIs, Ankit said that “APIs are no longer just a tool for developers or wrappers around code, but modern companies now consider APIs as products similar to websites or mobile applications, which are designed keeping in mind who the consumers are. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as APIs-as-a-Product.”

In addition to the two above-mentioned standout moments, we had some amazing talks from students and educators across the world. Here are some top picks from our participants:

Industry expert speakers

• Data Analysis with Twitter API by Suhem Parack
• Creating a Serverless API with Postman and MongoDB Realm by Beau Carnes

Student speakers

• Rishit Dagli: Building a Machine Learning API and Deploying using TF Serving
• Jada Lilleboe: How I Created an API for My Website
• Ritwik Ranjan: Build a Mobile App Using COVID APIs and Flutter by 
• Sumana Basu: APIs 101 with Postman 
• Çetin Kaan Taşkıngenç: Rest vs GraphQL
• Abir Pal: My Journey with Postman Student Community
• Manya Agarwal: APIs with Nest.js: Unlock the Potential of Node.js
• Omkar Agrawal: Testing WebSockets with Postman

Educator speakers

• Dr. Teresa Vasquez and Trinity Christiana: Lowering the Barriers to Learning APIs for Those New to Development 
• Connie Taylor: Making it Real: API-First as a Computer Science Curriculum

Thanks, and stay tuned for more

We would like to say a sincere thanks to our Postman Student Leaders and community partners who helped in making this a huge success. Special thanks to the nonprofit community organizations Girlscript Foundation, Code for Cause, Tinkering Hub, and Hack Club for helping us spread the word about this summit as our community partners.

We would also like to congratulate our “Visualize for the Prize” student hackathon winners, Omkar Agrawal and Abhishek Ranjan, who showed some amazing demos using Postman Visualizer.

Finally, this successful event wouldn’t have been possible without our amazing global community—so thank you for being part of it. And that’s a wrap. We’ll be back again with another exciting summit next year, so stay tuned.