Where to start?

Hey all-
I’m trying to learn more about APIs, and I was advised to use the catapi to get started. Does anyone have good beginner project ideas for someone who wants to create a webapp with an api? What types of projects do you all use the cat api for? Thanks!

That’s a great question @gummy, people have made all sorts of wonderful things with it. Big one that went viral last year using theCatApi was an advent calendar someone made for their partner - each day a new Cat picture would be revealed.

Creating a Tinder clone with Cat pictures is always a popular idea, using the Vote & Favourite methods to save a users choices on a ‘swipe right’, then show them their favourites later.

There’s a social network in Taiwan that uses it for avatars. Many, many, many mobile iOS & Android apps using it. If you’re interested in creating your own image recognition system then all the tags for each image are public to use via the ‘/images/:image_id/analysis’ method.

I’d start with a simple web app that:

  • makes a request to the images/search method (https://api.thecatapi.com/v1/images/search)
  • load the ‘url’ from the response as an image on the page
  • then have a simple button underneath that calls the API again to load a new random picture.

Once you’ve done that the the ideas start flowing, ‘what about selecting a different cat breed, favouriting, voting, uploading etc’

Any code issues, then time allowing i’m happy to have a look.

All the best, Aden