Smello for HTTP Requests

Good news, everyone. I invented a smell-o-scope.

Smello captures outgoing HTTP requests from Python and displays them in a local web dashboard. It’s like Mailpit for HTTP.

The whole setup is two lines of code:

My problem

I work with external integrations a lot. Some of these APIs have great documentation, but the majority don’t. This is especially painful for those enterprise “contact us for pricing” services. With some exceptions, their documentation is awful. Usually, they send you something like a large outdated PDF, incomplete and poorly formatted, available by request. If you’re a contractor, you may not even have that luxury. All you have is a Confluence page where someone left some internal notes for their future self. In this situation, the most reliable way to learn these APIs is to call them and look at what comes back.