Puppy School
Learn Dobermann by using it — on a live API, with real data, at real volume.
Puppy School is a free, hands-on course that takes you from your first API request to building your own data loaders. You work in Dobermann itself against The Training Ground: a live REST sandbox with master data, foreign key validation and a few other tricks so you can stretch your legs, and learn what true speed is, risk free.
What you’ll learn
Five lessons, about an hour end to end. Each one earns the next.
| Lesson | Trick | You’ll learn | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | First Contact | Shake | Connect to an API, run requests, read JSON responses in the DBMN way |
| 2 | The Big Load | Fetch | Push 67,000 records through the batch engine — then make it a hundred times more efficient |
| 3 | Handling Errors | Roll Over | Break it deliberately, find out why, fix the data, reprocess the failures like never before |
| 4 | Reporting | Speak | Turn a nested API response into the exact spreadsheet so you can share data quickly |
| 5 | Your Own Template | Jump | Build an endpoint and a nested data load from scratch — the graduation skill |
By the end you will be able to connect Dobermann to any REST API, load thousands of records in any shape it expects, deal with the failures that always happen, and get data back out in a form a human can actually use.
What you need
- Visual Studio Code with the Dobermann extension. Prerequisite: version 0.3.0 or later
- A free DBMN account — that’s the sign-in button below
- About an hour, though the course remembers where you got to, so it doesn’t have to be in one sitting
You don’t need an API of your own, a licence, or a credit card. Your personal Training Ground is included, and every lesson is free.
How it works
Each lesson is a short set of steps you carry out in Dobermann. At the end you hit Check My Homework and we look at what actually landed on the API — not what you say you did. Pass, and you’ve learned that lesson’s trick — there’s a badge for each — and the next lesson unlocks. Miss something, and we tell you exactly what’s still outstanding.
Finish all five and you graduate, with the Puppy School badge and a certificate to prove it.
A note on the dogs
Every carrier, product and warehouse in The Training Ground is dog-themed. The data structures are serious — GS1-aligned, EDI-compatible, foreign key validated, exactly what you’d meet on a real implementation. “BarkPost Express” is not.