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Mikhail Korolev
Mikhail Korolev

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APIs you didn't know you needed

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?

https://yesno.wtf/#api

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?

It's like this for that

ALL CAPS AS A SERVICE

http://shoutcloud.io/

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

http://www.foaas.com/

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

http://numbersapi.com/

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.

Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode




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

https://docs.tronalddump.io/

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/

Bill Murray placeholder

Got other services the world should know about?

Top comments (47)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Yes or No API

fml

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nssimeonov profile image
Templar++

Amateurs. We all know they should return also FileNotFound

thedailywtf.com/articles/What_Is_T...

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darksmile92 profile image
Robin Kretzschmar • Edited

Laughed waaaaay to hard on your comment, can relate 100% :D
Edit: the short fml at the bottom made it

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matthewbdaly profile image
Matthew Daly

Marvel have an excellent API for getting details about your favourite comics and characters.

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hugoliconv profile image
Hugo

I built a small app using that API.

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dance2die profile image
Sung M. Kim

This actually I need πŸ˜‰

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ns23 profile image
Nitesh Sawant

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.

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ananyaneogi profile image
Ananya Neogi

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!

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computersmiths profile image
ComputerSmiths

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"!

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ananyaneogi profile image
Ananya Neogi

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jafuentest profile image
Juan A. Fuentest Torcat

Why is this tagged as productivity?

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dansilcox profile image
Dan Silcox

It was β€œ!productivity” but the ! got escaped out :D

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myleftshoe profile image
myleftshoe

This is sort of list of speculative known unknowns. I didn't know about them so I didn't know if I needed them, but if i had known about them I would have known that I didn't need them. Didn't stop me from going through the whole list though. I guess now they're known knowns.

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joshed profile image
Josh Dzielak πŸ”†

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/

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raduq profile image
Raduan Silva dos Santos

My new favorite lorem ipsum generator

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theaccordance profile image
Joe Mainwaring

don't forget about placegoat.com/

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heyjtk profile image
JTK

For anyone that finds this type of thing funny I also have a bad fortune cookie api for which I'm taking bad fortune suggestions :) amazing list enjoyed the Ron Swanson API the most bad-fortune-cookie.herokuapp.com/f...

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danielescoz profile image
Daniel Escoz

placekitten is my new favorite thing in the world, thank you.

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philnash profile image
Phil Nash • Edited

PlaceCage is the premium option in the placeholder image world. πŸ˜„

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danielescoz profile image
Daniel Escoz

No, sorry, cats are better. πŸ™ˆ

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philnash profile image
Phil Nash

I disagree!

Nic Cage looking crazy.