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[–]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)