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carban — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 20:46:34 +0000

Tired of bloated API clients? Just try Postbear

carban ・ Jan 8

Tired of bloated API clients? Just try Postbear

carban — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:56:10 +0000

Check my first posts about Postbear 👉 I Built the Postman alternative

For years, Postman and Insomnia have been the kings of API testing. They are feature-rich, polished, and powerful. But for many developers, they’ve also become bloated. What was once a simple tool now feels like an entire operating system just to send a GET request.

It’s time to get boring about your API client and in the world of development, "boring" is a compliment. It means a tool that stays out of your way, works where you already live, and doesn't require a login to function.

Here is a solution Postbear: a terminal-native powerhouse that combines the speed of a CLI with the intuitive navigation of a TUI.

The Problem with "The Modern GUI" 🥱

We’ve all been there: you open Postman, it needs an update. Then it asks you to sign in to sync your "Workspaces." By the time you’re ready to test your endpoint, you’ve context-switched away from your code and into a heavy, electron-based window that eats up your RAM.

Postbear: Speed Meets Interface

Postbear is built for the developer who lives in the terminal. It offers a dual-threat approach to API testing:

1. The TUI: Visual Power Without the Bloat

Unlike basic curl commands, Postbear features a robust Terminal User Interface (TUI). This gives you the visual organization of a GUI—sidebars for collections, request/response panes, and easy navigation—but it runs entirely inside your terminal.

Keyboard-Driven: Navigate your API collections with keyboard speed.
Low Overhead: No heavy windows; just a fast, responsive interface that feels like part of your editor. Written in Golang one of the fastest programming languages

2. The CLI: Automation at Your Fingertips

Because Postbear is also a CLI (Command Line Interface), you can bypass the interface entirely for quick tasks.

Scriptability: You can trigger requests directly from scripts or your terminal history.
CI/CD Friendly: Since it’s terminal-native, it integrates perfectly into automated workflows.

Why "Boring" is Better

Why choose a terminal tool over a shiny app? It comes down to three things:

Zero Context Switching: Your code is in the terminal. Your logs are in the terminal. Your API client should be, too. Moving between your IDE and Postbear feels seamless.
Plain Text Truth: Postbear uses simple configuration files (.http). This means your API requests are version-controlled. You can commit your files directly to Git. No more "exporting collections" or proprietary cloud syncs.
Privacy & Ownership: Postbear is local-first. Your data isn't sitting on someone else's server; it’s in your file system.

Conclusion: Simplify Your Stack

Postman is a Ferrari—it’s impressive, but sometimes you just need a reliable bike to get across the street. By choosing a terminal-native tool like Postbear, you reclaim your screen real estate and your mental focus.

If you’re ready to ditch the loading screens and bloated screens, it’s time to give Postbear a spin.

🌟 I need your help to grow!

Postbear is open-source and just getting started. I have big dreams for this tool, and I’d love for the community to help shape its future. Check it out here: 👉 github.com/carban/postbear

I Built the Postman alternative

carban — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 20:15:29 +0000

Meet Postbear: The Postman alternative your terminal has been waiting for!

Hey everyone! I love Postman, but sometimes I just want to stay in my terminal, keep things lightweight, and move fast. I couldn't find a TUI/CLI tool that hit that "sweet spot" of power and simplicity—so I built Postbear as alternative.

Postbear is a high-speed, lightweight API client designed for developers who live in the command line. No heavy Electron apps, just simplicity.

Why you’ll love Postbear:

⚡ Fast: Starts instantly. No splash screens, no loading bars.
🪶 Minimalist: Small footprint, ready to go.
🛠️ Powerful: Handles headers, body data, parameters, and support to .http files.
💻 Terminal-First: Built for the modern dev workflow.

Use FooAPI

All the examples here uses fooapi.com an API created by me some months ago. The platform provides realistic dummy data across several categories, which you can use to mock your projects and ideas. Here is the first post I made, check it out, it is awseome! FooAPI First Post

Simple Usage

TUI mode

postbear

Read .http file

postbear read [.http filepath]

CLI mode

postbear run [method] [endpoint]

TUI Mode

CLI Mode

🌟 I need your help to grow!

Postbear is open-source and just getting started. I have big dreams for this tool, and I’d love for the community to help shape its future.

How you can support:

Star it on GitHub: It helps others find the project!
Try it out: Give it a spin and let me know what you think.
Contribute: This is a personal project any feedback is welcome. for major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

Check it out here: 👉 github.com/carban/postbear

OpenSource #WebDev #API #CLI #Postbear #Programming Tools

Wolfram's Automatas Explorer

carban — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 14:41:50 +0000

Hello everyone!

I've been working with cellular automata, and I decided to build an explorer platform that shows Wolfram's Rules Wolfram's Automatas Explorer.

Here, you can find all 256 rules and see each one in action. Exploring the rules, you will find different kinds of behaviors: simplest, repetitive, complex, and even chaotic.

Feel free to share feedback in the comments!

3D Data World Explorer

carban — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:05:11 +0000

My New Project

Hello there!

I'm working on a new personal project 3D Data World this project aims to be a fun place where you can explore data about the world. I decided to start this project to put my data analyst skills into practice, such as: data collection, data cleaning and data visualization.

For now, I just have one single category that is Population. You will find a slider where you can select a year, and the map will update accordingly, displaying the population for that year by adjusting the country's height and color.

In the near future, I plan to add more categories and explore different ways to visualize the data.

How it works?

The frontend is built with React and Cesium.
Country geometries were collected by fooapi.com using GeoJSON endpoints. You can know more about it in FooApi updates
Population data by country over time was scraped from ourworldindata.org

What do you think?

What kind of data would you like to see? If you have any feedback or ideas, feel free to share them in the comments section!

FooAPI Updates: Your All-in-One Fake API

carban — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 01:42:12 +0000

Hello there! 👋

This is my second post on dev.to regarding my API, I want to continue posting updates about FooApi here. You can read my first post to know more about the project and their features Introducing FooApi. FooApi is a personal project that aims to provide test data and different ways to manipulate it, all in one place, quickly and easily. That is why here you can find generic data, geographic data, images and methods like REST and GraphQL.

The platform provides realistic dummy data across several categories:

Users 😃
Products 🎁
Posts 📗
Comments ✍️
To-dos ✔️
Images 🖼️
Movies 📽️
Songs 🎵
Cities 📍 (GeoJSON)
Countries 🗺️ (GeoJSON geometries)

New Collection

Countries (GeoJSON geometries) 🗺️

Now you can retrieve country geometries through the /api/countries endpoints. All of them follow the GeoJSON format convention. In the documentation, you’ll find the list of available endpoints and examples at /docs/countries

Also I've include POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE endpoints for the Cities data collection. Remember You are free to explore and use these endpoints to mock your Geo Apps.

Custom Mock 👽

You can now create a custom mock endpoint! fooapi.com/docs/mock Here’s how it works:

You define the request method, status code, and response body, and FooApi will create an endpoint and a customID like fooapi.com/custom/abcd1234, then you can make your request and test your custom response.

This endpoint expires after 1 hour, so you’ll need to create a new one afterward.
In the meantime, you can edit the last one by simply updating the values in the UI and clicking Update Endpoint.

This is an initial approach, so feel free to share suggestions in the comments to make it even better!

Example:

Testing in browser:

Buy me a coffee!

I've created an account in buymeacoffee.com, if you want to support this project you can do it here: buymeacoffee.com/carban donations will be used to maintain and improve the project.

Recognition

I just want to hightlight that FooApi was featured in the weeklyfoo.com newsletter #66 by @urbanisierung . You can find there great tools like mine, along with articles, news, tutorials, and video recommendations.

The All-in-One Fake API for you

carban — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 22:33:48 +0000

Introducing FooApi

I am excited to announce a personal project I’ve been working on: fooapi.com. The service isn’t 100% complete yet—some features are still in development—but I plan to share progress and updates with each new release. This project began with the idea of creating a single platform to access data on various topics through different methods. The platform provides realistic dummy data across several categories, which you can use to mock your projects and ideas.

Users
Products
Posts
Comments
To-dos
Images
Movies
Songs
Cities (GeoJSON)
Countries (GeoJSON geometries)

You can find all the details in fooapi.com/docs

How to use it?

Currently there are two ways to fetch the data:

REST endpoints
GraphQL queries
(Would you like gRPC?)

If you go to fooapi.com/playground you can practice and test your queries

Some useful examples

Here are some practical examples of how to use FooApi.

1) Do you want to create simple placeholder images? easy:

fooapi.com/imgmaker/700/500/ff0000/000000/foooo

With this endpoint, you can customize dimensions (width and height), background color, font color (Hex format), and add a custom message.

/imgmaker/:width/:height/:bg/:fn/:text

More details in fooapi.com/docs/images

2) Do you want data to test your maps? just use:

fetch('https://fooapi.com/api/cities?limit=3')
  .then(res => res.json())
  .then(data => console.log(data))

The data for this category is real and not artificially generated because, in a real map, we should use actual coordinates, in case you’re wondering.

3) Something simple and useful is fetch a random user:

fetch('https://fooapi.com/api/users/rand')
  .then(res => res.json())
  .then(data => console.log(data))

Response:

{
    id: "1",
    name: "John",
    lastname: "Doe",
    username: "JohnxDoe11",
    birthdate: "1990-01-01",
    age: 30,
    gender: "Male",
    phone: "+63 791 675 8914",
    email: "foo@example.com",
    country: "USA",
    height: 170,
    weight: 70
}

4) Are you developing the next social media hit? check:

fetch('https://fooapi.com/api/comments')
  .then(res => res.json())
  .then(data => console.log(data))

Response:

[
    {
        id: "1",
        comment: "Sunshine and sci-fi sounds like a perfect combo! Enjoy getting lost in your book ",
        reactions: 0,
        postId: "1",
        user: {
            id: "50",
            name: "John",
            lastname: "Smith",
            username: "SmiJohnxD100"
        }
    },
    {
        id:"2",
        comment:"Don't forget the sunscreen!  What sci-fi are you reading?",
        reactions:1,
        postId:"1",
        user:{
             id:"2",
             name:"Akira",
             lastname:"Von Trier",
             username:"alphaVonAkirax853"
          }
    }
    "28 more elements..."
]

Now you are free to explore the data categories.

What do you think?

I’d love to hear your feedback! Remember, you can use this service to mock your apps, designs, models, etc. If you have ideas for new data categories or features, please share them in the comments.

Javascript Sets

carban — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 20:58:31 +0000

Hello!

Hello there! This is my first post on dev.to. I Just want to share a quick guide on how to use sets in javascript.

Sets

Similar to mathematics, a set is a collection of different kind of elements, numbers, symbols, vectors, variables or even other sets. [1] To define a set in Javascript, all you need to do is call the Set constructor, for example: new Set([false, 1, "2", 3, [4, 5], {"6": 7}]) here, I defined a set with different values, you can also add other types of values, such as numbers, strings, arrays and objects.

Basic Use

These are the basic methods you can use with sets: add, has, size, delete and clear.

const mySet = new Set()

mySet.add(0) // set(1) {0}
mySet.add(100) // set(2) {0, 100}

mySet.has(-1) // false
mySet.has(100) // true

mySet.size // 2

mySet.delete(100) // true
mySet // set(1) {0}

mySet.clear() // undefinded
mySet // set []

Applications

1. You can quickly check if an array has an element or not. First, transform it using the Set constructor and call the method .has()

const mySet = new Set([1, 8, 9, 3, 2])
mySet.has(2) // Result: true
mySet.has(0) // Result: false

2. Sets work with unique elements, imagine you have an array and your goal is to remove all the repeated ones, to do that just transform your array into a set. Doing that you will get an object with unique elements:

let array = [2, 3, 1, 8, 8, 5, 7, 8, 1, 1, 4, 3, 2, 1]
new Set(array) // Set(7) [2, 3, 1, 8, 5, 7, 4]

NOTE: Objects like { foo: 123 } in a set are not compared by their values but by their references (pointers to the object). That's why i n this particle scenario it will not filter similar objects.

3. Lets say you want to join 2 sets:

let X = new Set([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6])
let Y = new Set([5, 6, 7, 8])
X.union(Y) // Set(8) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

4. Now if you want the intersection between 2 sets (common elements):

let X = new Set([1, 2, 3, 4])
let Y = new Set([100, 2, 3, 400])
X.intersection(Y) // Set(2) [2, 3]

5. Which elements from X are not in Y? we can respond that question using sets difference, here is an example:

let X = new Set([1, 2, 3, 4])
let Y = new Set([100, 2, 3, 400])
X.difference(Y) // Set(2) [1, 4]

6. How to get elements that are not in common between 2 sets? the answer for that is symmetric difference:

let X = new Set([1, 2, 3, 4])
let Y = new Set([100, 2, 3, 400])
X.symmetricDifference(Y) // Set(4) [1, 4, 100, 400]

7. Can I iterate them? sure:

const mySet = new Set();

mySet.add(1); // Set(1) { 1 }
mySet.add("text"); // Set(2) { 1, 'text' }
mySet.add(true); // Set(2) { 1, 'text', true }

for (const item of mySet) {
  console.log(item);
}
// 1, 'text', true 

mySet.forEach((value) => {
  console.log(value);
});
// 1, 'text', true

Conclusion

Sets are important because they give you a new mindset to solve problems more efficiently. With them, tasks like filtering or searching (depending on the problem, of course) can become easier to handle and can save lines of code. Sets are everywhere and they are very important in computer science, remember that SQL works using sets theory in relational databases 😎.