Two weeks ago, I revisited all the API clients I found and checked out before to see in which way they evolved since Postman and Insomnia went all in on cloud sync. In the meantime, Insomnia already stepped back from that decision, and by now only requires a user account to be used as before.
Last time, I already noticed that some of the API clients seem abandoned, or at least there was not much activity.
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Kong just released a new version of Insomnia: Version 8.3.0 is a huge step back towards where Insomnia originally came from.
This may sound a bit weird at first, but it actually is good news. As Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong, admitted in a recent blog post, going all for cloud sync was a mistake:
We’re going to continue to work to make this right for the Insomnia community.
Pretty much exactly two weeks ago, I took a look at different options out there in the wild to find an alternative to Postman and Insomnia after both went straight towards cloud sync and mandatory accounts.
What I found back then caused a bit mixed feelings since there were several promising candidates but it was really hard or even impossible for me to identity one that fully satisfies all my needs and requirements.
Back in May, Postman announced a potentially ground-breaking change: Scratch Pad will be removed in favor of a "lightweight API client".
Until then, Postman seemed to be the de-facto standard for API testing but with the announced change that basically comes with the requirement to have a Postman account and to sync all data to the cloud, many people started to look for alternatives. For that very reason, ThoughtWorks recommended Insomnia in their latest issue of the Technology Radar around two weeks after Postman finally removed Scratch Pad and essentially mandated cloud sync.
Prologue A “content creator” created a (drone) video showing some nice landscape. Nothing bad or wrong so far. The video was uploaded to Instagram at first, I guess. That’s at least where I noticed the story that’s causing mixed feelings:
First Act In his/her Instagram story, the “creator” complained about the video being blocked by Instagram due to a copyright infringement.
Second Act In the subsequent story, the “creator” still seeming angry mentioned the account of some copyright-free music page pointing out that only electronic music will be used going forward, even though it won’t fit the nature video (for which some piano music was chosen stolen).
This year, online communication definitely is on a rise, and there is a wide variety of tools for that. Two of them are Slack and Zoom.
Slack is probably the best tool for instant messaging. Quite a while ago, they introduced a pretty cool feature already known from instant messaging: In addition to just indicating your presence (active/online or away/offline), you can set also set your status to whatever you like, including some icon or emoticon shown right next to your name.
After moving to a new office location, a lot changed – including the network setup. Different than before, we have to use Cisco AnyConnect now to connect to the VPN. Still, there are different VPNs depending on what I’m working on but everything else is quite different.
First of all, this means I can neither use networksetup nor scutil which I have used in my previous script to manage my VPN any longer.
During Corona time, I have to connect to a VPN most of the time in order to work. I use two different VPNs depending on what I’m working on. I can select the network to connect to from the status bar at the top of the screen but there seems to be a bug: Sometimes there isn’t anything to select, so I have to go to the network preferences and connect from there.
JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA is the best IDE I have ever worked with, and I guess don’t ever want to use anything else - or the tool I would prefer to use instead is yet to be invented.
Where it all started Most of the time, I used IntelliJ for Java development. Everything just works, right out of the box. Awesome! However, then there is this moment where you use something else, Node.
Recently, I started using Hugo with an older project. After I pulled the code and ran hugo, it failed. It turned out it was not yet compatible with the latest version that got automatically installed via Homebrew.
Well, no big deal, Homebrew allows for installing older versions of formulae. So I got it working.
Shortly after that, I started another new project (this blog, BTW). Guess what happened? It broke again, this time because the installed version of hugo was too old and not compatible with the configured theme.