API

After an unexpected debugging session, some thoughts on APIs, similar endpoints, swagger, and an ugly DevOps fail.

The week of NASA launching Artemis I is a good time to check a few of the many APIs that make tons of raw space data accessible for anyone to use.

I’ve got a few old newspapers from the 1930s and 1940s, and find them fascinating. And so I was excited to stumble on the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America API, which ‘provides access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages’. Let’s check it out.

Last year I caught an article about a simple, free service called ipify that returns your IP address. It became so popular the author soon found himself dealing with billions of requests per month! Here’s a look at that API and the IP Geolocation API that it spawned.

The Wayback Machine, a product of the Internet Archive, is an ambitious tool that’s been documenting websites for many years. It’s useful when a page you need is removed by the original author. Let’s take a look at their API and how we might make use of it.

After writing about so many APIs and having to figure out the auth process for each, I wanted to compare and contrast how some of these services approach authentication and authorization, and why they might’ve decided to do it the way they did.

The PasswordRandom API provides random values - and not just passwords as the name would seem to suggest. It also generates GUIDs, random numbers, characters, etc.

The Google Books API provides access to Google Books, which lets you search for any book and, at a bare minimium, see meta data about it. Depending on copyright status, you might also be able to see sample pages or read the entire book. You can also buy books.

Planet OS seems to have found a great number of services that provide scientific/weather/earth related data, regularly download a small sample set from each, and provide a way to access the data through their own API. Let’s see what they’ve got and what we can do with it!

The Internet Game Database is a community-driven site that collects and shares information about games and game-related data. Let’s check out the IGDB API!