API 1 - Random Programming Quote
This free API allows you to pull a list of quotes about programming (along with the author of the quote). You can pull one quote, a whole array of quotes, pull a random quote, or even pull a quote by author name. I decided to test my coding to implement this one and made a quick page here that displays a random quote every time the page is loaded. This page on Github has more about this API.
API 2 - Hunter Email Address Verification
This Hunter API allows you to do various tasks regarding an email address like domain search and email finder. But one neat task you can do is email verification that checks deliverability. This API is free for 50 monthly verifications. After that a paid plan (starting at $49/mon) is required.
API 3 - Random User Generator
This free API will generate full random information about for a user. The website claims "Like Lorem Ipsum, but for people." It returns name, address, gender, date of birth, other contact info, and even images to use.
Summary
In researching these public APIs it was really interesting to see the variety of APIs available out there. There are lots of fun ones (like the quotes, or memes options), but also a lot of really useful ones for displaying information or performing behind the scenes tasks (like email validation or creating a PDF from a web page). I think of all of the JavaScript things we've learned, I'm most excited about this because I have been asked by one client if we can make "xyz" happen, and so many times it came back to developing via an API... and I would look at it, not knowing much about JavaScript and be overwhelemed. I have been programming for over 25 yrs so I know the concepts, but with APIs, I always said I was missing a couple puzzle pieces. JavaScript is giving me those final pieces so that I can fill in the gaps where I couldn't quite figure it out and tools like Zapier were not able to bridge that gap.