Some Ideas For API Discovery Collections That Students Can Use

This is a topic I’ve wanted to set in motion for some time now. I had a new university professor city my work again as part of one of their courses recently, something that floated this concept to the top of the pile again–API discovery collections meant for just for students. Helping k-12, community college, and university students quickly understand where to find the most relevant APIs to whatever they are working on. Providing human, but also machine readable collections that can help jumpstart their API education.

I use the API discovery format APIs.json to profile individual, as well as collections of APIs. I’m going to kickstart a couple of project repos, helping me flesh out a handful of interesting collections that might help students better understand the world of APIs:

  • Social - The popular social APIs like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others.
  • Messaging - The main messaging APIs like Slack, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, and others.
  • Rock Star - The cool APIs like Twitter, Stripe, Twilio, YouTube, and others.
  • Amazon Stack - The core AWS Stack like EC2, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Lambda, and others.
  • Backend Stack - The essential App stack like AWS S3, Twilio, Flickr, YouTube, and others.

I am going to start there. I am trying to provide some simple, usable collections or relevant APIs for students are just getting started If there are any other categories, or stacks of APIs you think would be relevant for students to learn from I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’ve done a lot of writing about educational and university based APIs, but I’ve only lightly touched upon what APIs should students be learning about in the classroom.

Providing ready to go API collections will be an important aspect of the implementation of any API training and curriculum effort. Having the technical details of the API readily available, as well as the less technical aspects like signing up, pricing, terms of service, privacy policies, and other relevant building blocks should also be front and center. I’ll get to work on these five API discovery collections for students. Get the title, description, and list of each API stack published as a README, then I’ll get to work on publishing the machine, and human readable details for the technology, business, and politics of using APIs.