With everything recently being "as a service", there are a plenty of different data sources that can provide... stuff. Stuff as a service, of course. Behold a small collection of APIs you may or not have heard about.
Yes or no?
Making decisions is hard. Why won't you outsource this job to a third-party microservice to ensure that the they are as independent as possible? Returns "maybe" every 10.000th time as a bonus.
Taco API
https://github.com/evz/tacofancy-api
Are you in love with tacos? Can't decide what kind to make today? One HTTP request will get you a full recipe (with optional ingredients and categories of your choice).
Corporate bullshit
https://github.com/sameerkumar18/corporate-bs-generator-api
Do you find it hard to talk to Highly Enterprise Customers? Does your manager's manager want you to present a new topic for a weekly "0.5% team effectiveness raise" meeting? This will get you covered.
It's like this for that!
http://itsthisforthat.com/api.php
Another friend of yours quit the job and invested all the money and time into smart socks?
ALL CAPS AS A SERVICE
SHOUTING IS 100% THE WAY TO COMMUNICATE WHEN THINGS ARE IMPORTANT.
Ruby gem, npm package and go libraries are also available.
Automate things that are important
Highly advanced and flexible RESTful API that accomplishes a common task of telling people to fuck off.
Custom names, signatures and loads of other options are available. Having a hard time communicating with disturbing foreigners? i18n is supported, as well as SHOUTCLOUD integration listed above.
Lorem Ipsum
If you are tired of the regular boring Lorem Ipsum filling your template layouts, take a look at Bacon Ipsum - a meaty dummy text API. If you are vegetarian, Skateboard-themed Ipsum or Baseball one will get you covered.
And here is a Markdown-flavoured Ipsum generator as a bonus.
Numbers
We all love numbers. If you are in love with a particular number or date, you might as well want to know more about it. 78? A total number of gifts in the song The Twelve Days of Christmas.
And if you are bored, it is your chance to write a Slack plugin for PR notifications.
[thepracticaldev/dev.to] Pull request opened: #3 Klingon Code of Conduct
Lines changed as much as the number of years in 235 lunations.
Animals as a service.
The famous Cat API paired with Dog and Shibe API, as well as more lightweight random fox, cat and dog services will get you a heartwarming JSON response every time you need it.
Donald Trump API
As the most acknowledged political figure of modern US, you can always expect people to keep record of what you said in a searchable database with an easy to parse output format.
If you don't want to get political, there is also a simple Ron Swanson quotes API. And, of course a good supply of Chuck Norris facts that definitely comes in handy.
Everything you ever wanted to CURL about the food
https://spoonacular.com/food-api
Recipes, ingredients, menu items, nutrition data. Mount a webcam inside your fridge, label your food with QR codes and automate your cooking suggestions based on what you have in stock.
Dispose data with ease
https://devnull-as-a-service.com/code/
/dev/null in the cloud. Get rid of your unwanted bytes over POST requests. Free for up to 25GB/Month.
Spice up your placeholders
Not exactly an API in the same way as the rest of the services mentioned previously, but something you can't easily walk past.
http://placekitten.com/
http://www.fillmurray.com/
https://www.stevensegallery.com/
https://www.placecage.com/
Got other services the world should know about?
Oldest comments (47)
Yes or No API
fml
Laughed waaaaay to hard on your comment, can relate 100% :D
Edit: the short fml at the bottom made it
Amateurs. We all know they should return also FileNotFound
thedailywtf.com/articles/What_Is_T...
This is amazing! lol Thanks for the share
Super list - thank you.......maybe :)
This is great, especially the taco API. The VS Code extension that I'm helping build puts a little taco in your status bar near lunch time (not the main functionality, but a fun easter egg). 🌮🌮🌮
placekitten is my new favorite thing in the world, thank you.
PlaceCage is the premium option in the placeholder image world. 😄
No, sorry, cats are better. 🙈
I disagree!
So good!
Marvel have an excellent API for getting details about your favourite comics and characters.
This actually I need 😉
I built a small app using that API.
Fantastic list! I know now that I do, in fact, need all of these APIs :P
Here's a fun one I like for filling up those template layouts:
bobrosslipsum.com/
My new favorite lorem ipsum generator
I have recently created a API,that gives a quote posted by #Sadhguru on twitter.
sadhguru-quotes.herokuapp.com/api/...
GitHub repo
Please check it out.
RoboHash is a service that provide unique, robot/alien/monster images for any text, IP address, email, etc.
Can be used to generate random but cool user avatars for a site!
This is so much fun, thanks for pointing it out. I've changed my dry and boring "Your DHCP WAN address changed from foo to bar" to "and here's a picture of the robot"!
Thanks for the list Mikhail, like you said in the title, I didn't know I need Yes or No api or the food api!
Also nice to have the short list of good placeholder sites at the bottom, placeholders can never be too creative.
Great stuff! 💪
This might be well known but worth sharing.
httpbin: A simple HTTP Request & Response Service.
Why is this tagged as productivity?
It was “!productivity” but the ! got escaped out :D
The Pokemon API is amazing. So many front-end experiments have been "can I make a pokedex with this using the Pokemon API?"
Also where has that number API been all my life?!
don't forget about placegoat.com/