Introduction
We programmers have a tendency to reinvent the wheel. Can reinventing the wheel be fun? Yes. Can it teach you valuable skills? Yes. Should you always write thousands of lines of code to solve already-solved problems? No!
Empower yourself by leveraging the billions of lines of code written by other programmers to help you accomplish your code goals.
Want to generate a random image? Please, please do not create a yet another webserver to handle random image requests. Use one of dozens of random image servers instead.
Querying a random wikipedia page? No complicated web scraping necessary, this API has got you covered.
Here are some of the most interesting, funniest, and useful APIs you should include in your next project.
1 – usearch 🔎
This is as close to "Googling" as an API can get. The usearch API uses AI to retrieve search results on a query. For example, you could query the phrase "taylor swift" and receive Google-like pages of links about Taylor Swift.
You can try it out here.
2 – tempmail 📫
Whether to deal with spam, free trials, or something else, we’ve all used temporary emails. This API provides an interface for you to do just this, but programmatically. Tempmail can generate a list of temporary emails addresses for you.
Try tempmail in your next project.
3 – Google Places 🏫
Although Google’s APIs are used extensively, it seems the places API is a bit slept on. Places returns information about "establishments, geographic locations, and prominent points of interest." For example, I’ve used the Places Search API for a web scraping project where users could type in a Google-like search query (e.g. "Restaurants in Harvard Square", "Technology companies in San Francisco") and my program would send a sponsorship request email to each business matching the search query.
Explore the world with the Places API
3 – Kanye Rest API ✨
"I hate when I’m on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me like oh great now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle"
- Kanye Rest
Returns a random Kanye quote.
Build your sentient Kanye artificial intellgence with the Kanye Rest API
4 – Unofficial TikTok API 💃🏻
As a self-proclaimed TikToker myself, I love this easy-to-use, python-based API. This API can be used to obtain video metadata, author information, music, view count, hashtags, and so much more on trending TikToks.
Fulfill your dream of being a TikToker with this API.
5 – Coinlore 🪙
Coinlore is a cryptocurrency API that returns ticker info (e.g. price, percent change, market cap, etc.) for thousands of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin. My favorite part is that it also returns the coin’s social status, such as the number of active users on its subreddit or the number of followers on its twitter page. The best part about Coinlore—no API key necessary.
Become a Bitcoin millionaire with Coinlore.
6 – The Medium API 📓
The Medium API can give info on any user’s profile and allows you to publish a post to your profile programmatically. It’s a bit disappointing in that you can’t do much more than that, but it’s great for scraping information about Medium users! For querying articles themselves, regular ol’ webscraping is the way to go.
Find more info on the Medium API here.
6 – imgflip 😎
Imgflip is the ultimate meming tool. With imgflip, you can provide a template ID for a popular meme and a caption, then imgflip will return a link to the generated meme. You can also get an array of dozens of the most-captioned (i.e. popular) memes on the internet.
Make your next meme with imgflip
7 – Spotify API 🎵
With the Spotify API, you can get all the information on your favorite artists, albums, and tracks. You can also access user related data, like songs in their music library and their playlists. In addition to being very well documented, the API is really easy to use and clearly well thought-out. There are unlimited possibilities to what you can create with this API!
Find more info on the Spotify API here.
This is just a compilation of some of the coolest, funniest, most useful, and all-around best APIs that I’ve used. I hope you enjoyed the article.
Thanks for reading!
Further reading
Don’t just learn to code. Learn to build cool stuff instead.
