5 ms·

I've never understood the appeal of postman. What's wrong with a python script + requests?

by MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

phphphphp 4y ago
You’re about to get Dropbox’d: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- acdha 4y ago
  That’s not a great comparison: the two tools have very different users, and if you’ve ever used Postman for anything non-trivial you’ve probably hit things which are but should not be substantial points of friction (secrets, OAuth renewal, diagnostic output, etc.) whereas Dropbox really did a great job of doing exactly what you wanted with a minimum of fuss.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  Well and that's it right? They get developers on board early, and techies, etc... then shift to mass market and remove features and add anti-features. Github, slack, whatever else. it's a big long cycle. Now I see tools like Postman and the first thing I think is "how do they want my money, whats their strategy financially", things I never thought when I bought a CD-ROM or a one-time license to tools.
nickstinemates 4y ago
postman gives you a lot "for free" in terms of development and you can ship your project around to other, less technical people, or to prospects as a sales tool. lower barrier to entry. this is a dumb change, especially given you're not using any of their resources so artificial constraints on the number of runs makes zero sense.
- brookst 4y ago
  It doesn’t cost them anything to develop, test, maintain, and support?
  - nickstinemates 4y ago
    Then they should charge for the entire feature. Arbitrarily inhibiting usage when said usage has zero impact on the inhibitor makes no sense.
    - brookst 4y ago
      It sounds like a classic free trial / try before you buy to me.
      - nickstinemates 4y ago
        That makes one of us
floatrock 4y ago
Ease and iteration speed for complicated APIs. Why make notebooks when you can just make a single python script? Well, same way that notebooks are a REPL that remembers things, it's helpful to rapidly tweak parameters in your API calls, flick a menu to point to a different environment, retry requests on your own local instance, etc. Then when you have it all ready, you just save and it's shared with your team, and the non-developers don't even need to learn what a virtualenv is. Even your CI can take advantage of it. Well, it could. There's "nothing" Postman provides that you can't do with a python script and git, but it lets you move much faster and have a tighter iteration loop. That said, paying $10/user/mo just to effectively share a bunch of json definitions was always a plan that only made sense with corporate credit cards. With this added artificial restriction, my team is going to be looking for other alternatives. Dropbox gave a similar degree of convenience and that's why they took off. But once every cloud provider figured out they too can sync files in the cloud, the novelty became a commodity. This plan reeks of Postman being out of actual feature ideas so in their desperation they're just milking whatever they can get out of their corporates through artificial restrictions before "a cloud-sync'd API runner" becomes a software commodity and the lights go out.
- helloanoop 4y ago
  Yes, we need more tools that work on top of plain text files. And use git for version control. Currently working on a project to solve this https://github.com/usebruno/bruno https://github.com/usebruno/bruno
czx4f4bd 4y ago
I haven't touched Postman since they started pushing me to log in, but for me it was just an alternative to hitting GET endpoints with my web browser or piping curl to jq. If I'm looking through an API's docs and figuring out how it works, I often want to quickly test endpoints and see what they return. I could've written a script to do it, but Postman made that slightly easier by removing the need to write code or remember syntax.

I've never understood the appeal of postman. What's wrong with a python script + requests?

phphphphp 4y ago

You’re about to get Dropbox’d: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

acdha 4y ago
That’s not a great comparison: the two tools have very different users, and if you’ve ever used Postman for anything non-trivial you’ve probably hit things which are but should not be substantial points of friction (secrets, OAuth renewal, diagnostic output, etc.) whereas Dropbox really did a great job of doing exactly what you wanted with a minimum of fuss.
calvinmorrison 4y ago
Well and that's it right? They get developers on board early, and techies, etc... then shift to mass market and remove features and add anti-features. Github, slack, whatever else. it's a big long cycle. Now I see tools like Postman and the first thing I think is "how do they want my money, whats their strategy financially", things I never thought when I bought a CD-ROM or a one-time license to tools.

nickstinemates 4y ago

postman gives you a lot "for free" in terms of development and you can ship your project around to other, less technical people, or to prospects as a sales tool. lower barrier to entry. this is a dumb change, especially given you're not using any of their resources so artificial constraints on the number of runs makes zero sense.

brookst 4y ago
It doesn’t cost them anything to develop, test, maintain, and support?
- nickstinemates 4y ago
  Then they should charge for the entire feature. Arbitrarily inhibiting usage when said usage has zero impact on the inhibitor makes no sense.
  - brookst 4y ago
    It sounds like a classic free trial / try before you buy to me.
    - nickstinemates 4y ago
      That makes one of us

floatrock 4y ago

Ease and iteration speed for complicated APIs. Why make notebooks when you can just make a single python script? Well, same way that notebooks are a REPL that remembers things, it's helpful to rapidly tweak parameters in your API calls, flick a menu to point to a different environment, retry requests on your own local instance, etc. Then when you have it all ready, you just save and it's shared with your team, and the non-developers don't even need to learn what a virtualenv is. Even your CI can take advantage of it. Well, it could. There's "nothing" Postman provides that you can't do with a python script and git, but it lets you move much faster and have a tighter iteration loop. That said, paying $10/user/mo just to effectively share a bunch of json definitions was always a plan that only made sense with corporate credit cards. With this added artificial restriction, my team is going to be looking for other alternatives. Dropbox gave a similar degree of convenience and that's why they took off. But once every cloud provider figured out they too can sync files in the cloud, the novelty became a commodity. This plan reeks of Postman being out of actual feature ideas so in their desperation they're just milking whatever they can get out of their corporates through artificial restrictions before "a cloud-sync'd API runner" becomes a software commodity and the lights go out.

helloanoop 4y ago
Yes, we need more tools that work on top of plain text files. And use git for version control. Currently working on a project to solve this https://github.com/usebruno/bruno https://github.com/usebruno/bruno

czx4f4bd 4y ago

I haven't touched Postman since they started pushing me to log in, but for me it was just an alternative to hitting GET endpoints with my web browser or piping curl to jq. If I'm looking through an API's docs and figuring out how it works, I often want to quickly test endpoints and see what they return. I could've written a script to do it, but Postman made that slightly easier by removing the need to write code or remember syntax.