Postman Game on: How I Got 346 Collection Forks in One Day

The Postman Games challenge is a new public workspace that contains a series of requests that you send to receive trivia questions—all as a fun way to test your Postman IQ. We published the workspace at the Postman Galaxy global conference this February, and within just one day, the GET Your Postman Game On! collection received more than 300 forks and two pull requests. The game became a popular topic for discussion among event attendees and proved to be a fun way to break the ice at a virtual conference.

Our success with this game can easily be repeated and applied to any developer community, conference, or meetup. So I encourage you to play it yourself and then have a go at recreating the challenge in Postman by following these tips:

1. Make it visually appealing

The Postman Visualizer can come in handy to visualize API responses. We used it to render the crossword and word search games in Postman.

2. Collaborate for feedback

Once you have the collection all set, I recommend sharing the workspace with a private audience for testing. I initially invited just a few Postmanauts to try the quiz by forking the collection. Early collaborative testing helped collect feedback on the questions, possible answers, and the overall experience. On a personal note, it was a great opportunity to collaborate with so many Postmanauts and build something together.

3. Share your collection in a public workspace

Right before your event (after you’ve incorporated all the feedback to optimize your collection), switch your workspace visibility from Team to Public. The public workspace enables anyone with a Postman account to fork the collection. You can track how popular your collection is by watching the number of forks it has. Be sure to spread the word and share the link to see an upward trend of forks.

Pro tip: If the challenge leads to a prize, you’re much more likely to see an increase in the forks.

4. Don’t worry about perfecting it

There were a few issues with the Postman game challenge on the day of the event. While that had me nervous at first, the good part was that it led to a wider scope for contribution. During the conference, a few attendees even raised pull requests with certain fixes (e.g., correcting misspelled words and improving usability) and we merged them to the source. At the end of the day, it’s more about building a community than coming up with a perfect solution.

Let the games begin

Help us improve the challenge by contributing to the Postman Games public workspace. Also, check out the postman-quiz Github repository that includes the source code and all the help you’ll need to recreate the quiz with a different topic. Above all, don’t forget to have fun in the process.