Creating API

Building My First ever Dynamic Profile API

 This week started with my participation in HNG internship; with me shuttling between the two stacks namely: frontend web development and backend web development. It has been a challenging week;i saw that the backend was more challenging for me than the frontend (though it has its own numerous challenges) hence, i had to submit the frontend task first as soon as possible in order to focus on the backend.

For this, I worked on an interesting backend challenge as part of the HNG Internship Stage 0; a pre-requisite to move to Stage 1.

The task was to build simple RESTful API that returns my profile information along with a random cat fact fetched dynamically from the Cat Facts API: https://catfact.ninja/fact. It also has a timestamp that dynamically reflect the current UTC time at the moment of the request and update with every new request(of ISO 8601)

With my background grounded in PHP, i used PHP (OOP style) to build this simple yet powerful API.
The endpoint is available at /me, and it returns a structured JSON response in this format:
{
"status": "success",
"user": {
"email": "[e-mail]",
"name": "Oseni Adewale Oluwafemi",
"stack": "PHP/Laravel"
},
"timestamp": "2025-10-16T12:34:56.789Z",
"fact": "Cats sleep for 70% of their lives."
}
I created a small class called ApiClient to handle external API calls using cURL.
This class fetches data from the Cat Facts API (https://catfact.ninja/fact) every time the endpoint is accessed.
If the external API fails, the code gracefully handles the error by returning a fallback message instead of breaking the response.

The API also dynamically generates the current UTC timestamp in ISO 8601 format to ensure consistency.

I integrated the Cat Facts API inside my project using PHP’s cURL functions.
Every time a user hits the '/me endpoint', the script makes a real-time HTTP request to 'https://catfact.ninja/fact' and retrieves a fresh random fact about cats.

This helped me understand how third-party API consumption works in real-world applications — handling network errors, setting timeouts, and ensuring data is returned in the correct JSON format.

It was a great experience building something small yet meaningful that demonstrates how backend logic, API integration, and deployment come together.

Demonstration of the API can be found in the Railway app here: https://apiforhngassignment-production.up.railway.app/me

My githubGitHub Repo:https://github.com/oseniadewale/api_for_hng_assignment

What amazes me is that i have never on my own build an API but this task actually pushed me to a greater height in software development and i cant but agree with my motto philosophy that:
'if you can dream it; you can build it'