Unofficial APIs

Awesome! I was just looking at integrating Omnifocus and Notion to keep better notes and history of tasks, letting Omnifocus focus on just the task management side of the world.

It'd be cool to link up a script that takes a new task in Omnifocus under the right tag, and push a template into Notion for the note taking, and sync a link back into the notes field of Omnifocus for quick access.

It also has an official API: https://github.com/HackerNews/API

I'm actually the current owner of this repo!! I started it because I love working with unofficial APIs for fun hacks that improve my life. During college, I had an alert that told me when the Krispy Kreme donuts were fresh built off an unofficial API that promised enjoyable donuts.

If you're interested, I have a newsletter to update you when new repos are added https://forms.gle/e8nCivpTBNftNtgGA and to feature interesting stories from the community.

Haha the pokemonGo Api! I was in the final stages of a bootcamp right when Pokemon Go came out, and a bunch of us were desperately trying to put ourselves on the map by doing something lit with Pokemon Go. We discovered that the spawns were cycled hourly, so if we could gather enough data we could quite accurately map out every pokemon in the city. Then we came up against not knowing anything about parsing the data we were just yanking back from requests to the API... I think some point in the authentication phase? So we saw that python library, saw that they had solved the problem, but it was using something we had absolutely no idea how to transcribe to Node, and this is like, a bunch of 3 month old freshfaced Javascript devs. Figuring out Python was kinda out of the question (better to focus on pitching ourselves as hardcore Node/Javascript devs in the upcoming job search).

And then, like, three days after we started the journey, someone had not only beat us to the punch, they had done so at a professional level. I don't remember which site it was, but not only did it work perfectly, it didn't require the "crowd sourced" solution to mapping out pokemon that we were counting on. The developer/s had somehow figured out how to just yank all pokemon locations. And on top of that the app was functional, gorgeous, even had its own URL (we were still in the "all our apps are laughinggiraffe.herokuapp.com domains" phase).

All in all, great experience. A nice fresh slap in the face to how much work we had ahead of us, and good fun had anyway.