What's Your "I Wish I Knew This Earlier" API Tip?

#discuss #api #webdev #beginners

Every developer has that one API trick they discovered way too late.

For me, it was learning that most websites have hidden JSON endpoints you can use instead of scraping HTML.

For example:

Add .json to any Reddit URL → structured data, no scraping needed
GitHub's API gives you 5,000 requests/hour with a free token
Dev.to's API lets you programmatically publish articles (that's how I post!)
Most news sites have RSS feeds that are basically free APIs

Here's a quick example — getting Reddit data without any API key:

import requests

url = "https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/top.json?limit=10&t=week"
headers = {"User-Agent": "MyApp/1.0"}
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
posts = response.json()["data"]["children"]

for post in posts:
    data = post["data"]
    print(f"{data['score']:>5} | {data['title'][:60]}")

No API key. No OAuth. No rate limit headaches (if you're reasonable).

My favorite "hidden" APIs:

Reddit .json endpoint — free, no auth
Hacker News Firebase API — real-time, free forever
Wikipedia API — unlimited, no key needed
crt.sh — free SSL certificate search (great for security research)
npms.io — npm package analysis without npm's rate limits

The tip I wish I knew earlier:

Always check for an API before you scrape. I spent weeks building HTML scrapers for sites that had perfectly good JSON APIs hiding in plain sight. Literally just open DevTools → Network tab → filter by XHR/Fetch → find the API endpoints the site itself uses.

Your turn! What's your "I wish I knew this earlier" API tip?

Could be: