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Chris’ Corner: Makin’ Stuff

The most fun websites to build are websites that interact with outside sources. A user is an outside source! I’m obviously a bit partial to a website that asks a user to build stuff. That’s fun. But any outside source can be fun. Accepting uploads and doing something weird or useful with the data. Or using a third-party API for interesting data.

There is something magically fun about a weather app, for instance. You’re designing the site, but it’s designed around data you don’t control. Your job is to present the weather in a pleasing and useful way. That’s difficult to do even when you’re essentially copying patterns that already exist for it, and extra difficult to do something novel that could attract actual customers.

I’ve seen a college program that has students literally build a weather app. That’s a great project if you ask me. It involves an outside source of data, so you learn how to do that and make it efficient and resilient and respect bandwidth and limits and all that. The students also learn that websites are both front-end and back-end, and neither can fully compensate for weaknesses in the other.

A weather site is a pretty saturated space. But I believe in you, you can do it! There are other opportunities out there, though. Perhaps after you’ve got your feet wet with interacting with outside sources, something else will click for you that feels more personal.

I was thinking about this after reading Terence Eden’s Are there any open APIs left?. It was very interesting to me as I was vaguely under the impression that most of the really interesting cool open APIs didn’t really exist anymore. And, to be clear, “API” meaning general data access from some third-party source. A classic is that GitHub offers REST and GraphQL APIs for your use. Could you build something interesting with access to GitHub data? Or, perhaps a better question is could you build something interesting with access to GitHub data and whatever other outside source you can think of. Terence’s blog post lists some APIs still going strong.

Speaking of outside sources, let me leave you with a somewhat random collection of links to tools and ideas that maybe-just-maybe could be alchemized into an interesting website.

* Defuddle — “Get the main content of any page as Markdown.”
* Curate your own newspaper with RSS by Molly White
* Introducing the <geolocationHTML element on the Chrome blog
* A Gentle Introduction to CRDTs — “CRDTs are needed in situations where you want multiple processes to modify the same state without coordinating their writes to that state.”

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