In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Bifrost is the name of the rainbow bridge that allows instantaneous travel between the realms of gods and humanity. Similarly, and equally magically, our Bifrost websocket gateway lets Postman clients instantaneously connect to Postman services.
As I’ve previously shared in How Postman Engineering Does Microservices, all software architectures are a continuous work in process. Operating in the real world means occasionally re-evaluating old ways of thinking to adjust to new circumstances. That is the natural evolution of software design.
Here is the story of how Postman engineers developed the Bifrost websocket gateway by chipping away…
Just like Minecraft is more fun when a friend shows you how to make torches and avoid creepers, Kubernetes is also less scary with someone to guide the way.
The Minecraft wiki has lots of pointers for setting up your own server. But it doesn’t say how to do it with Kubernetes. I recently learned how easy it is to deploy an app to a local Raspberry Pi with Kubernetes.
Let’s try it again — this time to run a free Minecraft server on Kubernetes.
I’ve previously talked about the traits of a good collection. While not all collections grow up to be documentation, collections are the foundational building blocks for all Postman documentation viewable on the web. Here, I’m going to talk about the traits of good documentation.
Postman documentation has become widely adopted across the API community because it enables better collaboration and API adoption. Let’s learn from the thousands of publishers who document their APIs in Postman — like Microsoft, Twitter, and Dropbox — and find out what makes their documentation successful.
Effective documentation teaches someone how to use your API. Since…
Some mysteries in life can only be answered by data. For example, if you have questions about your Twilio usage, there are a few ways to dig into the data. There are prebuilt summaries and graphs of your activity in the Twilio console, and if you’re handy with a spreadsheet, you can export the data. There are also third-party providers with out-of-the-box analytics and visualizations.
In the case that nothing answers your particular question, this tutorial shows you how to make custom reports using the Twilio REST API to access your data and drive your own insights.
SpaceX is launching thousands of Starlink satellites to assemble a giant interconnected constellation in space. If you look up at just the right time, you might be lucky enough to spot some. But how can you know ahead of time when a satellite is going to pass overhead?
You don’t have to count on luck to see these tiny silver ants parading across the night sky. This tutorial shows you how to set up a scheduled job to check if a satellite approaches and send an SMS alert out to notify you.
A couple years ago, Postman CTO and co-founder Ankit Sobti shared Postman’s struggle to escape from a microservices dependency hell. If you want to learn more about how and why Postman Engineering ventured into microservices, check out Ankit’s story.
This is an update — here’s how Postman Engineering does microservices today.
Postman Engineering has 100+ engineers working across eight locations around the world. The company just announced a Series C round of funding, so things are bound to evolve as with any growing startup.
Let’s dive into how these teams are organized. …
In a recent Livestream with my teammate Arlemi, we unboxed some lights and messed around with the Philips Hue Lights API. We figured out how to turn on the light and change the colors using an API.
Then Arlemi queried a weather API — he wanted to update the light based on the weather forecast.
But the light was with me in San Francisco. And Arlemi was in London. So I was the only one who could update the device during the Livestream.
So the challenge began: how could I let Arlemi, and the…
Rate limiting can protect and improve the availability of your API-based services. If you’re talking to an API and receive the HTTP 429 Too Many Requests response status code, you’ve been rate limited. That means you’ve exceeded the number of requests allowed within a given period of time. Slow your roll and wait a bit, before trying again.
When you’re thinking about limiting your own API-based service, you need to balance tradeoffs between user experience, security, and performance.
Most internet service providers (ISPs) give residential customers a dynamic IP address. They pull from a pool of IP addresses and allocate one to a home. Since the IP address might change in a few months or even in a few hours, it can be hard to consistently access your personal computer when you’re away from home.
Setting up a dynamic DNS (DDNS) service gives you reliable access to self-hosted services, like a personal website, a Minecraft server, or just your home computer. …
For my last Mac, I had a friendly hamster face emoji in my terminal bash prompt. After I recently upgraded to a new Mac, I discovered Apple has replaced bash with zsh as the default shell, beginning with macOS Catalina.
Starting with macOS Catalina, your Mac uses zsh as the default login shell and interactive shell.
You can still switch back to bash, for now, but the trend is moving to zsh as the command-line interpreter for the login shell and interactive shell.
Here’s how you can add an Octopus emoji and other custom items to your zsh prompt to…
coding and cats in San Francisco