Announcing the “Go with the Flows” hackathon winners
Postman Flows is one of the latest additions to the Postman API Platform, and it has been making waves. Flows is a visual programming language designed specifically for APIs, and you can check out this workspace to see some example applications that were built by the Postman Flows engineering team. We recently announced Flows early access, which means that students around the world got a chance to build their own applications with Flows.
Postman Student Programs held an exclusive hackathon on their Discord server from November 22-December 12, 2022 to close out an exciting year of program updates. With exclusive access to the Postman Flows beta feature, students were tasked with building out a well-documented, unique, and useful Flow to compete for multiple prizes.
The prizes
The creators of the top three Flows received:
- A Postman swag store gift card
- A feature on the Postman blog
- The opportunity to demo their Flow on a Student Programs livestream
The judges
Postman Student Programs Team
Claire Froelich: Student Programs Manager
Ali Shaikh: Senior Developer Advocate
Ruby Sattar: Senior Developer Advocate
Postman Flows Engineering Team
Sterling Chin: Engineering Manager, Labs
Joseph Fusco: Software Engineer II, Flows
Daniel Kimmelmann: Flows Engineer
Christopher Patty: Technical Lead
Saswat Das: Staff Engineer
And the winners are…
Pratik Pakhale, Indian Institute of Information Technology
Winning Flow: “Spotify x Twitter”
Flow summary: This Postman Flow generates a pie chart of the characteristics of your top tracks from Spotify and tweets it on your behalf. To do this, it uses Spotify, Twitter, and a custom API. First, the Flow gets your top tracks from Spotify and then fetches all the features of these tracks. It extracts the necessary fields and creates an object to generate the pie chart using the custom API built over Chart.js. This API returns a base64 encoded image string, which is then passed to the Twitter media upload to get a media ID. Finally, the media ID is attached to a tweet and posted.
Flow highlights: What makes this Postman Flow unique is that it generates a pie chart of the characteristics of a user’s top tracks from Spotify and tweets it on their behalf. Also, the Flow uses a custom API to extract the data needed for the pie chart and then returns a base64 encoded image string. This API can be used in many ways to get encoded image strings with the help of Chart.js
A word from Pratik: “I learned a lot from using multiple APIs at this hackathon. I’ve always wanted to try out the Twitter OAuth and Spotify API, and this hackathon allowed me to use them and even add cool animations to test the workflow. Plus, I learned about image encoding and how to upload media to Twitter. Overall, it was a really fun experience.”
Watch the Flow demo:
Rohit Purkait, Techno Main Salt Lake
Winning Flow: “API 101 Jokes Flow”
Flow summary: The API 101 Jokes Flow helps Postman users visualize the API 101 content given to every Postman Student Leader for their first session. With this Flow, Leaders can explain what each request is doing easily through the use of the Flow visualization.
Flow highlights: The way in which the Flow is laid out makes it easy for users to see how the original collection is broken down. Any other engineer can reuse the Flow for their own tests by swapping out requests to match their own API collections.
A word from Rohit: “One of the major learnings, or rather understandings, was how much Flows will make our lives easier. In our day-to-day jobs, we encounter a lot of APIs and oftentimes we get a huge collection to deal with. Now, if someone creates a Flow for that entire collection, then anyone who sees the collection for the first time will just have to run the Flow and he/she will be able to visualize how the collection works. As for my experience, it was great and I hope to learn and create more with Flows.”
Watch the Flow demo:
Chintan Patel, LDRP Institute of Technology and Research
Winning Flow: “Get Answers in One Sentence”
Flow summary: This Flow uses the OpenAI and Slack APIs to ingest a prompt (question) from a user and send the relevant answer in one sentence to a specific Slack channel. It gets the answer to the question by using the OpenAI API and then it sends the answer from the response to the specific Slack channel using the Slack API.
Flow highlights: This Flow makes it easy for users to have any question resolved in just one sentence.
A word from Chintan: “I had zero knowledge about Flows when I participated in this hackathon. Therefore, I had to learn from scratch. I learned everything I needed from the Postman Flows docs, recorded live streams, and other YouTube videos showcasing Flows. It was very interesting to build a workflow integrating multiple requests. Flows make it very easy to send data between different requests without navigating to one request from another through a test script. I enjoyed playing with different blocks in the Flows.”
Watch the Flow demo:
Check out other submissions
Congratulations to all of the participants in the “Go with the Flows” hackathon for their excellent submissions, thought-provoking questions, and engagement throughout this exclusive event!
Get some inspiration for your next Postman Flow by checking out this public workspace, which contains all of the other submissions.
Learn more about Postman Student Programs
If you’re interested in learning more about APIs and API development in Postman, or if you would like to know how to teach these concepts in your classrooms, check out Postman Student Programs. You can get certified as a Postman Student Expert—and earn a digital badge, too!
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