I've been using Postman for about 7 years now and I must say, it was an amazing journey. When I started as a software developer there wasn't any good tool to create/test/share APIs but then Postman appeared in my life and made everything much, much better. 7 years later, Postman is the industry standard. Very well done, Postman 👏!
During all these years of using Postman I've also found many disadvantages. It turns out, sharing your requests is not that simple, it has so many features I don't need and that makes it difficult to find what you do need. The application is slow to start and eats a lot of memory. Still, with all these disadvantages I was using it everyday without even thinking to search for a replacement. Until one day.
I've just switched jobs and I was discussing with my new teammate, Csaba, about designing the API for a new set of features we were to develop. I proposed to use Postman for the API design and then start the implementation based on the contract we define between the frontend and the backend. He told me that he knows a better tool for this task: REST Client extension for VS Code. I was skeptic 🤨about this, after all, Postman is the industry standard, use by so many developers. Even so, there was one thing that I loved from the beginning: I was able to /create/test/share the api from within the comfort of my editor 🤟. I mean, how awesome is that? And there is more, I can design my APIs by writing code, it has auto-complete, variables and no unnecessary functionality. We created a file .http file in our repository and off we went on coding our APIs. There are so many advantages to this like: it's easy to do versioning, track changes and share the file with other developers.
I removed Postman from my laptop and I've been enjoying this extension ever since. Go have a look at this extension and let me know how it helped you.
Thanks Csaba for introducing me to this extension.
Top comments (0)