haha

haha the idea comes from the fact that the tool is not opinionated - in the sense that yes its an API client but its also an editor, etc. So it a tool with infinite possibilities and can be as flexible as people want. So this is the idea: void-endlessness-freedom.

If it didn’t scare you alot, will you try it? :)

obsidian, sentry, Voiden (for API work, open sourced it)

interesting. what is the tool that the company accepts as low risk? Would it be postman or would it be something offline?

try https://voiden.md/ (not.app)

does it work?

oh. whats the security error?

thats awesome - let us know what you think when you try!

Our team lives in Git, our communication is happening on slack, our docs written and maintained on confluence and after some time they always drift away from the actual requests inside Postman.

So we built and open sourced Voiden a few months ago: an API tool where all that: specs, tests, context and docs are always together in the same executable plain text file (markdown). We also made this Git native so that every change is versioned and tracked just like code.

The last change we have made is to add a Runner so that one can run the files directly from the terminal and CI/CD pipelines.

here is the tool: https://voiden.md/download repo: https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden

welcome to try and give feedback!

what do you mean beyond the skill level?

awesome!

depends on the size of your team I guess? Postman used to really be the default API client for serious API testing. https://kaluvuri.com/blog/when-the-category-leader-stalls/

And yes curl is great and is a big inspiration for Voiden. In fact we built it inspired by curl and obsidian.

The problem I see with curl is that real API work is almost never just one request typed into a terminal like some kind of beautifully minimalist Unix haiku. It involves auth, environments, copied headers, reused payload fragments, request chains, documentation, testing, debugging, sharing examples with teammates, reviewing changes in Git, and trying not to break prod because you forgot to swap one token or one base URL.

At that point you can not “just use curl” right?. You use curl plus other things. Curl plus shell scripts, curl plus notes, curl plus env files, plus copied commands from Slack, plus random JSON files, plus tribal knowledge etc etc… Which is fine I guess but isnt it at some point super annoying and hard to collaborate on? That is the gap that I see this tool (Voiden) trying to solve.

So for me it is not “curl vs Voiden.” curl is a low-level execution tool. Voiden is a workspace for actual API work: writing requests, organizing them, reusing pieces, documenting them, testing them, versioning them in Git, and not duplicating the same headers/body/auth setup 45 times :)

does this resonate?

what do you currently use? what are the limitations of what you tried and were not happy with?

yes, indeed thats the idea. No need to log in or create an account on someones cloud.

yes, plain text - markdown in particular, we have seen some devs do some great things we didnt even think of (it gives flexibility to create very weird and custom flows)

yeah, around 11k installs so far - and a few committed and opinionated contributors :) - hope you give it a try.

thats super sad…I dont have a problem with someone not wanting chit chat but isnt better to just say “hey, today I am not in much mood to talk” or to show it and to make it happen without explicitly selecting it in an app…

its just very black mirror esque

yeah, do agree with part of it. Without HashiCorp Terraform, we probably wouldn’t have OpenTofu at least not in the form it exists today. In that sense, VC money did indeed help bootstrap something that eventually became broader open infrastructure.

You could argue the same happened with Elasticsearch leading to OpenSearch, or Redis eventually leading to Valkey.

So yes, venture funding can indeed accelerate the creation of useful open ecosystems.

The tension I am pointing to is more about the transition phase. When a project grows under the assumption of being open community infrastructure and then the business incentives shift later, it tends to create friction: license changes, forks, community distrust, etc.

Forks are actually a feature of open source: they are like the ecosystem’s pressure valve. (But they also show that the incentives between companies and communities drifted apart at some point.)

So I would frame it less as “VC-funded open source is bad” and more as: “VC-backed projects often bootstrap great ecosystems, but the sustainability model tends to get figured out later, and that’s where things get messy.”

In some cases we end up with something great like OpenTofu. In others we end up with fragmentation and uncertainty. Both can happen.

haha indeed - modern has this “blinking lights” annotation. something that is shiny.

True story - once, in primary school, I went to a halloween party, where all the boys were dressed as batman and all the girls as macarena (guess my age). The host of the party was maybe the only one not dressed as batman.

He was wearing some weird jell in the hair, like a punk kind of thing, with a lot of strass, stars all over his body, some heart or thunder shaped big mirror glasses, a shiny jacket and the best looking blue mocasines I have ever seen. He also had a big radio antenna (??) coming through his nylon electric yellow vest.

I asked him: what are you dressed as? and he replied: “Modern”.

true as well

true :) I heard this actually even from ex insomnia folks - the direction could have been much different.

• bruno does have a paywall last time I checked :) but the point is not to have tool debates :) my main point is around overall philosophies and ways that new things are like older things with a small twist.