I’m currently working on my final project for Learn Verified- a single page app with an AngularJS front-end and a Rails back-end. Like I’ve said before, coming up with a project idea is often one of the biggest hurdles of these assessments. For my current project I found myself browsing APIs and hoping to be inspired. Here are ten fun APIs I came across… maybe you’ll find one to use for your next project! 🙂
- 1. San Francisco OpenData – OpenData is a treasure trove of information. My favorite data set details Film locations in San Francisco.
- 2. NASA API – I’m not sure exactly what NASA offers, but hey, it’s NASA!
- 3. We the People API – The White House has a petitions API! They’ve also laid out API Standards for government created APIs. A little more info: Using our API, you can bring We the People petitions to third-party platforms (including other petition services, personal blogs, and websites) in order to spread the word and help gather even more signatures. Any signatures collected this way, once validated, will count towards the signature threshold needed for a petition to receive an official White House response. Think of our API as a valuable tool for building community support around an initiative — it can help get a petition in front of more eyes, more quickly, with exciting results.
- 4. Pokemon API – Finally; all the Pokémon data you’ll ever need, in one place,
and easily accessible through a modern RESTful API. Gotta catch ’em all! - 5. Marvel Comics API – The Marvel Comics API allows developers everywhere to access information about Marvel’s vast library of comics—from what’s coming up, to 70 years ago. Search 70+ years of comics by character, series, creator… OMG
- 6. Yoda Speak API –Turn your sentences and webpage into Yoda-speak. This one is pretty silly, I’ll admit.
- 7. The Cat API – Cat pictures!
- 8. Audiosear.ch API –Search for words and keyword tags in a full-text index of top podcast and radio shows. Get web profiles for podcasts, and find audio about trending topics, and audio recommended by influencers like Ira Glass.
- 9. BreweryDB API – Beer beer beer!
- 10. National Nutrition Database API – Our API provides REST access to the National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference (NDB) . It is intended primarily to assist application developers wishing to incorporate nutrient data into their applications or websites. That sounds awfully dry, but I think it could be super useful. Bookmarked!
If none of these APIs excite you, you can search Programmable Web’s API directory by category & protocol. Want a little handholding? Codecademy walks you through working with several popular APIs(Twitter, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.)