Exploring DEV.to API

You often forget that APIs exist for most of the platforms you use. While some companies lock down their APIs to only provide very limited information, DEV.to goes the extra mile to provide an extremely robust API. Let’s go over what is available!

Link to Project: https://www.josephamaurer.com/Projects/DevAPI/RecentDevPosts.html

Link to DEV API Documentation: https://docs.forem.com/api/

DEV’s API allows for lots of interesting functionality. In the video above, I go over a use case where you pull the latest 100 posts, and create bootstrap cards for each. In each card I display three buttons. The first is either active or disabled if the user has a twitter account. This is useful because I like to retweet articles and tag their creators. The second button is a link to the DEV post. Finally the third button opens the API response for the article.

While my example showed articles, there are lots of different things that the API can return to you. One of the more interesting functionality is the ability to post an article completely from the API. I have no idea why you would want to do that, but it could be useful.

All in all, it’s cool to think that this functionality exists, even if you can’t find a practical use case for it. One of the more useful use cases might just be populating your recent articles from your blog to your website.

Let me know what you would want to do with this API!