APIs

I think one of the best thinks I like to fidget with is APIs. It speaks to the child in me when I can pull in data and manipulate and display it without personally having to seed a database with dummy data.

API- An Application Programming Interface (API) is a computing interface that defines interactions between multiple software intermediaries. It defines the kinds of calls or requests that can be made, how to make them, the data formats that should be used, the conventions to follow, etc. It can also provide extension mechanisms so that users can extend existing functionality in various ways and to varying degrees. An API can be entirely custom, specific to a component, or designed based on an industry-standard to ensure interoperability. Through information hiding, APIs enable modular programming, allowing users to use the interface independently of the implementation.

If you are a dev and have scoured the web you probably have noticed the thousands of APIs available to a developer. Some are good and some are awful. Some are fun and some provide important, serious data.

Here is a small list of some of the APIs I have used thus far…

Giphy- Everyone loves a good GIF (That’s GIF with a hard G sound. Its not peanut butter). Giphy has a vast and seemingly endless supply of them. Get going on that GIF generator.

Game of Thrones- I had so much fun playing with this one. The data in this API has been scraped from “A Wiki of Ice and Fire”. One of the cool things about this you can decide whether to use data from the books or the show….yes there is a difference.

Rick and Morty- Super simple API. Great for new devs to test out and play with.

Fortnite- My son LOVES Fortnite, more than anything else. I think I won some brownie points when I showed him this. It pulls in player data making a gaming companion build simple.

TheMealDb- It is well known and well used. The build possibilities are endless with the design of this API. Just like a Todo list app, a recipe app is on everyone’s build list when starting out.

NewsAPI- When I need to pull current articles and news stories this is where I go. It is easily configurable and manipulated to your taste. It pulls from a vast array of news sources.

My API Wish List:

Why isn’t there a full scale Walking Dead API? I can find five different Game of Thrones APIs, but not one Walking Dead API.

So I guess if it doesn’t exist…..get to building it.