One of the greatest parts of my job is getting to learn, write, learn write in a never-ending pattern. I got to play with Docker Swarm on our Carina offering at Rackspace and wrote up this blog post. It’s a tutorial for using Carina to create a Jawbone App with node.js. You could see the results at https://sleepify.me, but the site is no longer maintained.
While looking for a data-driven REST API for that tutorial I came across Mashape, which has a marketplace for APIs. I found the “They Said So” quotes API while looking around for a word-nerdy data project next. I could also try out the Merriam-Webster Dictionary API and of course, the best word-nerd API there is, Wordnik. So much data, so little time.
I find it fascinating that these API marketplaces are popular. Mostly when I ask developers about the usefulness of a site like Mashape they can’t come up with a great use case. I wonder if discoverability of APIs is an important part of promoting and educating people about your API. I think that with more and more API definitions, there is more and more need for discoverability. And of course, documentation. Opportunity abounds.