How Postman uses Postman: endpoint monitoring, continuous testing, and API-first design
We love hearing from our community about how you’re using Postman to improve your API development experience—it truly continues to inspire us. But have you ever wondered how we might be using Postman internally as we’re building the Postman API Platform and optimizing our own workflows? In this series, “How Postman uses Postman,” we’re taking a look inside the engineering teams to see how they’re using Postman.
Today, we’re chatting with Postman Engineering Manager Andrea De Pirro of the Postman API team. Andrea is based in Barcelona, Spain.
Andrea, what were you doing before you joined Postman?
Aside from being the engineering manager of the Postman API team, I’ve been working as a software engineer at various levels and companies for more than 15 years.
Getting to know the Postman API team
What does your team do?
We maintain and expand the Postman API, which you can use to manage Postman resources programmatically. Additionally, as part of the platform organization, we define best practices, guidelines, initiatives, and tooling around API-first design. We also maintain the documentation for the Postman API on the Public API Network and oversee our Private API Network, which contains the documentation for Postman’s internal services.
[Editor’s note: Explore the many Postman API capabilities by checking out our Postman API tutorials on the blog.]
What’s something you’ve worked on recently?
We’ve been working on several new endpoints for the Postman API to simplify interacting with collection forks, billing accounts, and tags.
Do you have any fun stories about your team?
Our team operates entirely remotely, with members from Italy, Spain, the USA, Greece, and India. One cool aspect of our diverse team is how we share photos and details about national holidays, traditional customs, foods, and celebrations from their respective countries. This not only strengthens our connection with each other but also enriches our understanding of different cultures.
How the Postman API team uses Postman
Does your team use Postman while working on Postman?
We use Postman on many levels. First, we have several monitors that constantly check every endpoint of the Postman API in both pre-production and production environments. In order to prevent introducing breaking changes, we also created a collection for our end-to-end tests using the Postman CLI that runs on every pull request. It simulates responses from internal services internally using mocks.
As part of our API-first design initiatives, we also collaborate with other teams using the governance features and API design functionality. Of course, we also use the Postman API itself to automatically update our collections and APIs when we change something in our services.
How has leveraging these Postman features affected your team workflows?
Having a recurring check of every functionality we offer in our pre-production environments allows us to catch errors before they are released to production. The end-to-end tests reduce the feedback loop during development, speeding up integration and pull request reviews.
Was your team’s internal use of Postman a remedy for a one-off challenge, or have you implemented it as an ongoing practice?
It’s an ongoing practice. We continuously update our collections, monitors, mocks, and more, both manually and automatically, with the Postman API. One of the cool things about working on a product you use is that you have the opportunity to actually improve it for your own team, benefiting every other team in the world.
How did you get team buy-in for implementing this practice?
We developers are “lazy.” We tend to automate boring stuff like verifying that something is working as it should or creating a fake API to test out functionality on the client side. Once you show your team that doing the boring stuff is fast and easy with Postman, the buy-in comes naturally.
Did anything surprise you about using Postman to solve these problems?
The simplicity of setting things up. In five minutes, I can create a working mock endpoint, make a request to it from my service, and verify that my code works as expected.
What Andrea has learned from using Postman
Tell me about a recent challenge you’ve had to overcome while working on Postman.
With a recent overhaul of one of our monitor collections, we can now test both production-ready features and those still in development in the same collection by simply switching environments. It was challenging because we had to find a way to exclude certain requests and run them exclusively in development environments.
What are your favorite productivity tips for working with Postman?
Organizing collections and folders, plus having well-defined environments, gives me a big boost to productivity. With a simple environment switch, I can make the same requests and get results from production, pre-production, or a local environment. Having the same set of requests for both real and development environments saves me a ton of time when testing and developing a new feature.
What’s something more people should know about Postman?
You can interact with Postman from several entry points: the desktop app, the web app, the Postman CLI, and, if you need a more complex interaction, the Postman API.
What impact have you seen from customers after leveling up their use of Postman?
As part of the Postman API team, we connect with teams of all sizes and deal with all kinds of integrations. From observability to automation to complex workflows and simple notifications, we have seen teams grow and include more and more Postman API functionalities in their workflows to simplify automatic documentation or monitoring or integrate with their billing system or CI/CD system.
More about Andrea
Without revealing any secrets, what’s something you’re excited about working on or exploring for the future of Postman?
The introduction of generative AI with Postbot opened a world of possibilities for everything we do at Postman, including the Postman API.
Do you have any side projects or hobbies outside of work?
I play Dungeons & Dragons every week with a group of Italian friends in Barcelona. Apart from that, I’m obsessed with LEGO and retro video games. I even have a full-size old-school arcade machine in my apartment!
The bottom line
Andrea and his team work on developing and improving the Postman API, which allows you to manage your Postman resources programmatically. Using Postman has helped the Postman API team review integration and pull requests faster, cut down on development feedback loops, and find errors before they hit production.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experience, Andrea!
Tell us how you’re using Postman in a comment below. Interested in becoming a Postmanaut and joining our team? Check out our Careers page.
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