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 shared how to build resilient APIs with chaos engineering and security hacking with the Big List of Naughty Strings. I’ve also broken some hearts, so I have some experience with breaking things. In this post, let’s go beyond basic test automation in Postman, and learn why intentionally trying to break things increases the resilience of your applications. We’ll also explore some common negative test scenarios.

Happy path vs. Unhappy path

During product design and development, stakeholders focus on intended user behavior. Product owners describe this happy path with business requirements. Engineers push code to enable users to do these things. …

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.

What is good documentation?

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.

Tutorial requirements

• Python version 3
• …

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.

Tutorial Requirements

• Python version 3
• A personal phone number to…

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.

Who is Postman Engineering?

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.

Why rate limit?

When you’re thinking about limiting your own API-based service, you need to balance tradeoffs between user experience, security, and performance.