81: What is an API?

09/21/20 • 27 min

Development (and web-dev in particular) is a field full of initialisms and acronyms. We often take them for granted without thinking too much about these things that we use every day. This week we dive into one of the most common TLIs (Three Letter Initialisms) that all web developers will encounter sooner or later: APIs (also known as Application Programming Interfaces).

How well do we know our TLIs? How (and why) might you scrape data from a web page? And why would using an API be preferable? And when should you take the time to learn APIs? Find out all this and more in this week's application-interfacing instalment of A Question of Code.

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Previous Episode

80: What’s it like behind the scenes of a podcast?

To celebrate our eightieth full episode, we pull back the curtain to show you how the sausage gets made. When we were starting out, "meta" episodes like these were a great way to learn how our podcasting heroes ran their shows. Now, we're not calling ourselves "heroes" just yet, but we've been doing this long enough to have some tidbits of advice for anyone looking at starting their own show.

How much preparation do we do for each episode? (Spoiler alert: very little) What gear and software do we use to record the show? And how much time does it take to edit? Find out all this and more in this week's introverted instalment of A Question of Code.

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82: What is semantic markup?

This week we get deep into the weeds of HTML. What tags do we use (and are they the same as the tags we should use)? And who are we wring our markup for? Just browsers, surely?! But what about search-engine crawlers and accessibility tools?

So how can we structure our web pages so that they do a great job in all scenarios? How much do we care about the distinction between links and buttons? Find out all this and more in this week's semantically meaningful instalment of A Question of Code.

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