In the software development world, practice makes perfect. Therefore, we should find as many ways to practice programming as possible.
With free public APIs, we can practice programming by creating apps that use those APIs.
In this article, we’ll look at some practice project ideas that can use some of those APIs.
Animal Photo Apps
We can create animal photo apps easily with a few API. They provide us with URLs of pictures of cute animals like dogs and cats that we can use to create apps with.
Some APIs include the Cat API, which requires an API key before it can be used.
The Dog API is completely open and provides us with data on URLs of dogs and their breeds.
They’re also the RandomCat, RandomDog and RandomFox APIs, which provide animal photos of cats, dogs, and foxes respectively.
The Shibe.Online provides us with random pictures of shiba inu dogs, cats or birds.
Anime App
We can create our own app to display anime data with the AnimeNewsNetwork API. It provides us with anime news in XML format.
This is actually good since it gives us a chance to use libraries to transform XML to JSON in order to use them in our code, thereby learning more about JSON and data in the process.
Also, there’s the AniList API, which provides us with a GraphQL that requires OAuth authentication.
We can all use some practice with both so that we’re prepared for any job that uses OAuth or GraphQL, which are increasingly common technologies used for authentication and building APIs respectively.
GraphQL is useful because it lets us control what kind of data we want to be returned in the response. That kind of control is hard to get with REST APIs.
If you’re fans of Studio Ghibli anime like the Totoro series, there’s also the Studio Ghibli API that gets us data about them all in one API.
Museum App
We can build our own app to display text and images from museums. There’s the Rijksmuseum API that lets us get access to their art collection’s data with one API.
It requires an API key for access so we can use it without much effort.
There’s also the Harvard Art Museums API that lets us access their art collection.
If we want access to icons, we can use the Iconfinder API to get access to their icons by registering for an API key.
Books App
Building a book is great since let us practice displaying data from books. We can use the Google Books API to get access to their vast collection of books.
It also uses OAuth so that we can practice using OAuth to gain access to APIs.
Also, we can get book data from the Open Library API which has data in XML or JSON format. We can change the format within the query string that we use to access the data, so it lets us practice with building query strings and using it to access data.
Trello App
Trello is simple and easy to use task tracker. We can add our own functionality to it by creating power-ups, which are plugins that use the Trello API to customize its functionality to our own liking.
The Trello API lets us do anything to it that we allow by setting the capabilities from our own Trello account’s dashboard.
Google Analytics App
Google Analytics collects data from our websites so we can track the traffic that’s coming and get some insights from it.
To automate this process, we can use the Google Analytics API to get access to the same data that’s displayed in our own programs.
We can then customize the google analytics functionality to our own taste by using the API to write our own programs.
Holidays App
The Calendar Index API gets us holidays from around the world and working days.
The data is accessible via an API key so we can get the data and use it in our own program with ease.
Conclusion
With these APIs, there’re lots of projects we can do with it for practice. We can even use them ourselves if it provides us with a useful function.
Just because they’re practices apps doesn’t mean we can’t use them if they’re useful.
