→ Bruno: Local-first Postman Alternative ∞

I think I came across this tool via Hacker News 🤔. But may be not. Anyway, it does not matter.

Why it appealed to me ?

At work, we have a shared Postman workspace, which often breaks.

Because anyone and everyone can modify it (which is some times needed) But then people click the Save button, because it is easy to 😄

and now, it is broken for others.

OK, there is a concept of fork in Postman, but then everyone has their own fork.

It is same as git fork. One has to keep the fork up to date.

Here comes bruno.

First thing I liked about it is that we can import from Postman. So that one does not need to create entire collection from scratch.

Once imported, it becomes a script/text, which can be version controlled

Next thing is secrets.

I have not yet figured out where and how they are stored. But secrets is one of the reasons, I was attracted to bruno

With local first, developers are free to use their own passwords on their machines.

I was able to get APIs working from Postman to bruno without much friction.

I did have to create environments from scratch. Not sure why they were not exported by Postman Maybe because they contain secrets ? 🤔

But once I added all the variables to Local environment, I can just copy-and-modify to create other environments.

At work we have a LOT of environments (At least 10. Yeah, I know)

I’ll be exploring bruno’s capacities in coming days. Like Bruno CLI, tests etc.

Uninstalled Instagram

Few hours ago, I uninstalled Instagram from my phone.1 Ironically, earlier today I watched a reel on Instagram saying “Instagram is like Chakravyuh, and we are like Abhimanyu. We can go inside, but not come out”.2 I think that made to take this action. I noticed that I had not written much in the entire month of August 2023, and hardly 2 entries in September. While some of it attributes to work pressure, my instagram addiction may be equally responsible.

Emacs Bedrock : First impressions

As mentioned earlier I tried new starter kit called Emacs Bedrock. Getting started was easy with --init-directory option in Emacs 29 I also enabled a few mixins in init.el as recommended. Especially evil mode. The *Quick Help* that shows up at the start is very useful. Especially for someone like myself who is not familiar with native emacs keybindings. Enabling evil mode means I can at least edit the text.

Use different init directory in emacs 29+

Recently when reading about emacs Bedrock I learnt that emacs 29+ has command line option that lets the user pass custom init directory via emacs --init-directory=MYDIR option. 1 This makes it easy to try out different starter kits without touching your stable/working config Currently, I use Minemacs on my personal machine. In past I would rename my .emacs.d to try new config. (Then switch it back) This makes things easier.

Spellcheck in Vi/m

I’ve been using vi for 20+ years and somehow I didn’t know that it has spell check built in 🤷‍♂ Enable it by simply :set spell Now misspelled words are shown in red background 1 (depending on the terminal’s capability this might vary - I assume) Off course, this is nowhere near full fledged LSP like ltex which I use with emacs and helix. ltext does more than spell check.

Markdown vs Orgmode

My thoughts in the context of this thread. I did try org for some time (initially when I switched to Emacs) as mentioned here But eventually I realized that markdown is more pervasive. I am aware that Org is supported outside of Emacs as well. But compared to markdown, that is nothing. But that is not necessarily the point. e.g. When I do code review, most of the git service providers support markdown.

Respect and Authority

Why do we “listen” to somebody ? Here I do not mean hearing when I say listen I mean obey or follow. I think it comes from either respect or authority. Authority maybe given by someone else e.g. Teacher in school, boss at work, parents at home. Lot of times, most people do what these people tell you to do, because of the authority inferred on them. Because you are “supposed to” do what they say.

Rails is not ruby

I had written earlier how learning the language before the framework is more important. It is important to know which parts is part of the language, and which comes from the framework. This becomes more important when there are defacto web frameworks (rails in ruby, django in python, phoenix in elixir.. maybe more) For a newcomer who is learning both the language and framework together (or back to back, or worse learning the language via the framework tutorials :shudders: )

Trying Macports

I was aware of macports for quite some time (since I moved to macOS about 8 years ago) But most of the tools seem to be suggesting brew install, so I didn’t give macports a second thought. 8 years later, my MBP is old, and soon will not be supported by Apple and brew While I upgraded to macOS monterey, this is going to be last version supported on this hardware.

Interesting Netlify Build Problem

After build problems with my PKM site, today I ran into another problem with this site. What puzzled me was Deploy showed Build step failing but no useful error (other than exit code 2 - which does not help much) But in the process of debugging, I learnt 1 about the environment variable NETLIFY_BUILD_DEBUG (set to true when needed) It did not help 😞 I also upgraded hugo version (which is another environment variable) in the process.