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Aashir Khan
Aashir Khan

Posted on • Originally published at justaashir.com

Fill up your portfolio with meaningful projects in 2020, Use these APIs

This post was first published on my official blog

Hi, You should be filling up your portfolio with new shiny projects, then just landing pages of dummy websites.
People want to see a real-world app with all the data, they want to feel it and they don't just want lorem ipsum.
So It's time for you to use an Open API to create a real-world project. You can create a project with these APIs using Vanilla JS, JQuery, VueJS, React or even Angular.
You just need to fetch the data from the APIs and then use it, you can pass different parameters to give the users dynamic search functionality or filter and sorting.

Let's Start

TMDB

It's a very great API to start, who don't like Movies? There are lots of possibilities, You can create your own IMDB like database website, or better trailer and movie recommendation website with Modern UI. Recruiters really like a project like this, but try to be a little unique cause otherwise, it'll look like a copy-paste of just API calls.

Open Weather

Weather App is just the simplest example to show, just use this API and pick up a clean UI from dribble or Pinterest and try to make an app, It would be really great if you make a PWA, It will stand out as it'll show the cached data and can be installed on any phone.

Unsplash API

I guess you've used their website to get backgrounds or stock photos. It's a huge collection of royalty-free photos. You can also use their API, to get backgrounds and pictures by categories, sizes, search parameters, and random. You can create a chrome extension for a new tab to show a random picture every 1 hour with a clock and Pomodoro.

PokéAPI

It's a really well-cooked API if you're trying to learn something and it's really fun, you can create a card game or a Wikipedia of Pokemons. If you love Pokemon then this is the best API for you to get your hands dirty.

Rest Countries API

It's the only API you'll ever need if you're looking for information about countries. It'll give you all the information like Currency, Postal Codes, Calling Codes, Capital, Cities, Population. You can create a beautiful analytical page for every country using charts and data.

This post was first published on my official blog

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Top comments (14)

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adahyto profile image
Adam

Cool article. The NASA Open APIs are worth to check out also!

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justaashir profile image
Aashir Khan

Yep, NASA is perfect for beginners and it's a lot flexible than other APIs so it can be used easily in many ideas.

I'll add it to the main list

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antjanus profile image
Antonin J. (they/them)

For all the gamers out there, try out IGDB which has an API to interact with game-related data :)

If you fancy that over a movie database!

Thanks for the list!

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justaashir profile image
Aashir Khan

Thanks, for adding more value to this list.

I'll look up to this, and then add it into the main list.

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cvasq profile image
Carlos V

This SpaceX REST API is also worth checking out! :)

github.com/r-spacex/SpaceX-API

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justaashir profile image
Aashir Khan

Thanks, for this.

I'll look up to it and add NASA and SpaceX in the main list.

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kylefilegriffin profile image
Kyle Griffin

With the unsplash API, a regular fetch request will get N number of the same picture over and over. How does one modify the request to get a different one for each iteration of the loop?

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justaashir profile image
Aashir Khan

Can you provide some more information like what framework you're using?
And what end result you want with the real-world example. 🙂

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kylefilegriffin profile image
Kyle Griffin

Literally just using the fetch promise in vanilla JS and outputting it using Map or a forEach loop. What do you propose?

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ad0791 profile image
Alexandro Disla

Cool. It's very appreciated. I am starting my journey with Elixir. For some reason i seems to be attracted by it. we will see what i will be able to do.

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iamtravisw profile image
Travis Woodward

I recently used PokeAPI to build a voice activated Google Assistant app. It's a really good API!

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wobsoriano profile image
Robert

Curious on how the PokeAPI was integrated?

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nifemiderin profile image
King Niphemi

What's PWA

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pau1phi11ips profile image
Paul Phillips

Progressive Web App