Why Postman should be included in your writing workflow
Postman’s most useful feature
One of the most useful features for Postman is its documentation feature.
What is Postman?
Postman is a software development toll that enables people to test calls to APIs. Postman is able to do this when the user enters data, that data is sent to the specified web server address, and in most cases the information is returned to the user.
What is an API?
An API is an acronym for application programming interface, which allows interaction between multiple software intermediaries.
For example, if you wanted to see all pull requests on a repo in GitHub, you could go into the GitHub’s web interface and click each repo and select pull requests. Or, you could open Postman and GET repos/owner/repo/pulls to see a list of all pull request in your repo.
So what’s so important about Postman’s documentation feature?
Postman allows you to quickly publish documentation by automatically creates sample requests, headers, code snippets, and more. The documentation is populated with dynamic examples. Currently, Postman supports the GitHub flavor of Markdown. Which means that documentation can be created quickly and edited by many without a sharp learning curve.
Requests are updated every time a collection is updated, which means you can create the most up-to-date documentation. One of the cool aspects of Postman is that Postman can host your documentation. You can create a web instance of your documentation by clicking View in web. By default, the web view is private and if you have access to the edit the documentation, you can do so in the web view.
The collaborative nature of Postman means that your documentation can be shared on most websites or imported into a collection at any time. Furthermore, your team can share feedback through comments and code reviews which helps increase the accuracy of your documentation.
Postman has a great functioning documentation feature. If you’re a technical writer documenting APIs, Postman should be a tool that is included in your tool set.
If you’re not using Postman, what are you using and what are the advantages of your software development workflow? Let me know in the comments.