Okay, here’s my attempt at a blog post reflecting my “jan 16” coding session, mimicking the style you described:
Alright, so yesterday, Jan 16th, I was messing around with this new API. I figured, “Hey, why not build a simple thing to test it out?” So, that’s exactly what I did.
First off, I had to actually get the API key. Spent like, a solid 20 minutes digging through their docs. Seriously, why do they hide these things? Eventually, I found it buried in some obscure paragraph.
Next, I fired up my code editor, VS Code, of course. Gotta have that dark mode! I started with a fresh Python file. I’m pretty rusty with Python, mostly been doing JavaScript lately, but I figured it’d be quick enough.
I started by importing the requests library. I mean, gotta make those API calls, right? Then, I set up the basic URL and headers. This API needed an ‘Authorization’ header with my API key. Pretty standard stuff.
Then came the fun part: actually making the request! I decided to start with a simple GET request to fetch some data. I messed around with the URL parameters for a bit, trying to get exactly the data I wanted. After a bunch of trial and error and looking back to the API documentation to check on the correct parameters for the API endpoint I was calling, I managed to get the response back.
The response was in JSON, naturally. So, I used the .json() method to parse it into a Python dictionary. Then, I just printed out the relevant data to the console. It was cool seeing the thing work! I mean, after all that effort, something showing up was nice.
But it wasn’t perfect. The data was all jumbled up. I was doing some data manipulation and transformation, I wanted to filter on certain fields and values. The result? Some of the keys were missing. I was like, “What the heck?” Turns out, the API returns different fields depending on the specific resource. I had to add some checks to see if the fields existed before trying to access them. Super annoying!
After fixing that, I decided to try a POST request. This API lets you create new items, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I created a dictionary with the data for the new item, then I used the json= parameter in the method to send it as the request body.
Got a 201 Created response! Sweet! Checked the API, and the new item was there. Felt pretty good about that.
Then, I spent another hour trying to get pagination to work right. This API uses cursor-based pagination, which is kinda weird. It took me forever to figure out how to get the next page of results. I kept getting errors, and the documentation was super vague. Finally, after a lot of Googling and some serious debugging, I got it working. Basically, I had to extract the cursor from the response and use it as a parameter in the next request.
All in all, it was a productive day. I managed to get the basic API functionality working. Still lots to do, but at least I have a solid foundation to build on. Now, time for some food.
