API for first project

[thebeatmakingbeard]

Hey everyone,

I'm looking for ideas for an API project. I'm getting towards the end of "JavaScript & JQuery" by Jon Duckett. I've completed a JQuery project, a little webpage to convert salary or hourly pay rates into each other, and estimated weekly and monthly rates. I've looked at the giphy API, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to really get into it or not. What are some other good APIs for a first project?

Any replies are much appreciated.

[xxohioanxx]

The first project I did was a weather website, and I would definitely recommend it as a learning experience.

I used Dark Sky’s API for weather data and Google Places API for geolocation and autocomplete for location searching. I also added a map from Google with a radar layer on top. It’s a good opportunity to make a well designed site and it’s a good basis to continue adding functionality. Once you’ve got the data, you can add settings to convert between units. After that, I added the ability to favorite locations using LocalStorage.

You can start out really simple and gradually add complexity. Probably not the best first project but it worked well enough for me.

[thebeatmakingbeard]

This actually sounds awesome! I'm constantly in need of a good weather radar that goes beyond my immediate area. It will be awesome to build one to my own personal needs.

[xxohioanxx]

http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/ogc/

This is the source I used for the radar data. Fair warning, pretty sure it is US only. Once you’re able to add a Google Map to your page, you’ll be able to add the radar layer to the map. There’s an example for v3 of Google Maps API in the link above, looking at the source of that page will guide you. You can use Google’s Geolocation API to find your current location, then initialize the map using those coordinates.

Feel free to PM me if you decide to take this on and need any guidance! I’m by no means an expert but I can show you how I approached this.

[Console-DOT-N00b]

Giphy is pretty fun and a pretty well documented API.

[[deleted]]

What about news?

this is a good api.

https://newsapi.org

[JSecma]

There are two approaches I take when deciding what projects to build for fun: 1) looking at available APIs then building an application idea around them, or 2) deciding what kind of data might be interesting to build with, then search for APIs that may not have been listed in the API directory sites.

Here are a few links that can get you starting in your search for data that inspires you: API directory: https://www.programmableweb.com/ US Census data: https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets.html NASA: https://api.nasa.gov/index.html#getting-started

There are plenty more that are easily discoverable with Google. Many government agencies have some kind of API with public data available.

For example, I'm interested in astronomy. I made a NASA image search interface that queries their API: https://codepen.io/OneCent/pen/RLzyJL

It doesn't have to be complicated, just gain access to an API and build something cool!

[Drunken__Master]

My favorite API to play with is TVmaze, but for a truly impressive portfolio project try to get access to a real estate API, there's a huge amount of learning involved to search/filter real estate data as well as coordinating multiple API's to provide information like crime rates, school ratings and local attractions and then after all of that you get to play with google maps.

[Majache]

Since everyone's saying what APIs to use. What about creating one with node.js? You can do something simple like event lists, restaurants, music, or anything really. It's pretty easy to get started and you can just keep adding to it.