What interesting API are you using? Please share!

Comments

[Michael Scott Shappe]

Stripe API. First time integrating with a payment processing service. They make it so damned easy that I find myself wanting to come up with something of my own to sell just to have an excuse to write something else that uses their API. No, seriously, it's THAT good. Documentation is excellent, libraries are excellent, they've thought of nearly every scenario you might encounter both for one-shot transactions (e.g. a storefront) and subscriptions... I've rarely wanted to track down fellow engineers to buy them a round of beers, but Stripe? If you're listening? Some day, I owe you a round.

[Mike 🤘]

I love the Stripe API. They absolutely nailed the documentation. Love it.

[Blair Dowis]

thanks for the tip! I've been shying away from projects that involve payment because I was under the impression it would be really complex.

[Michael Scott Shappe]

Stripe has figured out how to take care of just about all the complexity, including actually handling credit cards so that you don't have to store any CC data yourself (whew!). If you have a subscription service, you define the plans with them and they take care of the recurring charges. They even handle coupons.

[Eoin Murphy]

Stripe's APIs are very well documented. A good documentation goes a long way.

[Kim Arnett ]

Face and Emotion API from Microsoft - Processing camera input from the Hololens to detect age, gender and emotion in real-world scenarios. It's been fun, this is just the beginning in playing around with what's actually useful in the Hololens world.

[Ben Halpern]

That's cool! I've played with some of Microsoft's face/emotion stuff, but have not tried the Hololens at all. Does the emotion stuff actually work reliably yet?

[Kim Arnett ]

So far so good!
I'm week 2 into hololens and day 3 into the API's. Emotion has been pretty spot on for every face I've tried. Face has been good on the attributes, but about 50/50 on age. It's either about 90% accurate or a decade off.. which has led to some good laughs in the office.

[Dalton Claybrook]

I just finished making a pizza button using an AWS IoT Button and the unofficial dominos pizza sdk for node.js. The docs are a little lacking in areas, but if you have an app like Charles, you can sniff the network traffic and get a good idea of what you need to send. Also very satisfying to order a pizza with a button.

[Kim Arnett ]

I'm interested in being a QA for this! 😂 1st test: Verify if pizza shows up.

[Filipe Jorge]

foaas.com

It's hugggeee!

[Matt Olson]

Philips Hue API. Smart lights seem like just another IoT yak to shave until you start to find things to do with them.

I'm imagining a monitoring setup for work where a few key metrics that aren't world-on-fire critical are mapped to a team's lights. As metrics go above normal, lights get orange... as they go below normal, lights get blue. Far enough in either direction and people are going to notice and investigate, but it's less intrusive than pagers/emails/Slack alerts.

[Jeremy Kenyon]

I worked at a NOC where we had Philips Hue lights linked up to New Relic for our production sites. When things went down the lights would go red and back to green when everything was cleared up. We also had devs that would tie lights into their automated regression tests when doing deployments so that if there were problems with any of the tests they would know immediately as well. It was really slick.

[OzBob]

All your API are belong to us: #swagger.io, #swashbuckle, #AutoRest

[Tyler van der Hoeven]

• Plaid API. Great for accessing bank info.
• Baremetrics API. Lovely if you have a Baremetrics account.
• Product Hunt API. Easy, fun, surfaces some interesting data.
• Trello API if you have a Trello account. Lots of fun to fool around with for making complex or repetitive tasks simple.
• Unsplash API. Super powerful. Very easy. Tons of data and well it's Unsplash so you gotta love those guys.
• Stripe API. Been said already but I'll echo. I've tried a lot and Stripe is so so good.

[Keeley Hammond 🌻]

Haven't started using it yet, but this seems like a good place to ask - does anyone have experience using the Strava API? I want to start a side project that analyzes my run data and haven't tried to link it up yet. Planning on using a combo of JS and Python.

[W. Brian Gourlie]

The chain-error API for rust. It provides all the nice aspects of exceptions without all the shitty aspects of exceptions.

[Co-op Source]

I'm using Clojure (Arcadia/ClojureCLR) in Unity3D to program VR apps. It is a very interesting development environment/API that is very powerful. Normally this would require using C# but with Arcadia I can use Clojure. See: github.com/arcadia-unity/Arcadia

Another interesting API (kinda) is Preact - a React.js API-compatible library that is "Fast 3kb React alternative with the same ES6 API. Components & Virtual DOM." See: github.com/developit/preact