DEV Community

Cover image for Highlights of the First-Ever API Fest: Powered by Students, for Students
Jan Schenk (he/him) for Postman

Posted on • Originally published at blog.postman.com on

Highlights of the First-Ever API Fest: Powered by Students, for Students

An exciting way to kick off 2022, the Postman Student Community hosted the first-ever API Fest on January 26-29. The four-day event successfully encouraged students to learn by doing and embrace the benefits of API-first development. Over 900 participants and 108 teams from 28 countries dove into the inaugural fest’s main theme of “Learn, build, and develop API-based applications in a team format.”

At the start of the fest, most students who registered for the event weren’t very familiar with the API-first approach: when asked about their level of experience working with APIs in our opening survey, the average score was 2.47 out of 5. What did we find when the fest was finished? When surveyed at the end of API Fest 2022, after four days of interactive sessions and opportunities to practice their skills, the average score jumped to 4.1 out of 5.

Two API Fest workshops from the Postman team that likely influenced that big gain in knowledge were:

  • Day 1: Postman Chief Evangelist Kin Lane led a workshop on “Designing API Schemas” where he explained API-first design and guided students to develop simple schemas.
  • Day 2: Postman Student Community Manager Claire Froelich delivered the workshop on “Coding an API Using an API Schema” where she taught students how to code their APIs and use them in real-world applications.

To get a sense of how these workshops and the entire event were received, scroll through the storm of #APIFest on Twitter. Here are two examples of tweets about API Fest:

Top 10 student projects of API Fest

We had 34 mentors from companies like Twitter, Cerner, Capgemini, and many more who volunteered their time to guide student teams throughout the event, which ultimately announced a list of Top 10 Teams. Here are the details of those 10 amazing projects and their teams:

Powered by students, for students

API Fest 2022 was organized by our Postman Student Leaders, who planned and executed the event with the support of the Postman team. Learn about our Student Leader Program here.

The post Highlights of the First-Ever API Fest: Powered by Students, for Students appeared first on Postman Blog.

Top comments (0)