[ehnto]

I put together a side project some time ago that allows you to retrieve and display arbitrary API endpoints, to create a dashboard of realtime data.

One of the bigger challenges was finding appropriate APIs to use. The idea being that it had to make sense as a realtime datapoint. Current temperature in California is one example.

Part of the solution I tried for the end user was to add a searchable database of APIs, but I never found many that had that kind of realtime datapoint. The majority of use cases for APIs seems to be CRUD apps, authentication, unchanging datasets, or really specific once off data transforms.

I feel like that's a bummer, as I really love the idea of being able to build up a dashboard of random data points about the world that interest me. The number of astronauts currently in space, the temperature somewhere I like to visit, the traffic density on specific roads. All retrievable individually from various apps, but not in one scifi intelligence center style place.

For anyone interested, the site was https://apiblocks.com

[z4chj]

The best part about this site is the API database link in which you can find a Ron Swanson quotes API. Thank you for that entertainment