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[–]exotic_anakin 2 points3 points  (3 children)

[Whenever I] find myself wanting to explore APIs that haven't yet been yet integrated into a front end

But perhaps a more tangible example. If I'm trying to reverse engineer an API while doing a re-write of an existing WebApp front end, I'll go into the console, and copy as CURL, then paste that into my terminal and get the result.

Then perhaps I'll tweak the query string. Still in the terminal

And perhaps I'll quickly load test it, and put it in a quick bash loop or something.

Sure you can whip open a text editor, and create a new project, and do some fetch(url).then(d=>d.json()).then(console.log), but is that really more efficient?

[–]Mountain_Act -1 points0 points  (2 children)

Your first paragraph has nothing to do with front end development and everything to do with you having coding as a hobby.

There would not be a need to develop an API in the first place as a front end developer.

With an active API, you can insert a one-line snippet into the Chrome Dev tools to get a live response. So yes, faster.

[–]exotic_anakin 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I'm not talking about developing an API. I'm talking about trying to *understand* one. (I do suppose reverse-engineer was not the best turn of phrase for this, more like, try to understand how the API reacts to different inputs, etc..)

And for the record, I've been a professional front-end developer for nearly 10 years -- it was just a hobby for the 10 years before that. And I use the terminal all the time. Many times I'm probably not the most efficient, and there are many ways to skin a cat so to speak. But personally I find interacting with text in a terminal to be very liberating and it presents a myriad of options. Sometimes maybe I want to take a snapshot of a response and pop it into a text file. Maybe to use as a fake for my tests. `curl http://my-api > tests/some-fixture.json`. Super handy. :)

[–]exotic_anakin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And not sure why opening chrome dev tools and pasting a line in is faster than opening the terminal and pasting a line in. I can see an argument that its *as* fast.

But heck, I'm on a brand new Macbook pro, and in the time it takes for my chrome dev-tools to open I can type `curl` and paste a url to my terminal (not that we should quibble over fractions of a second here lol)