Talking about useful APIs for your next pet project
Printful - Lets you upload designs, preview items, and then order almost any type of merchandise via API. Printful handles shipping and manufacturing
Mux Video- Handles all the complexity of working with video, just upload the file and Mux creates multiple versions of it and pushes to a CDN. Also supports live streaming
Lob - Lets you send postcards, letters, checks, and more with a few lines of code
Twilio - Already well known for SMS, but they've expanded their product range a ton and have a bunch of new features to play around with
Plaid - Makes it easy to connect to users bank accounts and takes care of security and regulations
Google Cloud AI - Could have put a few different companies here but I like Google's AI APIs because they give you $300 in free credit, plus most people already have a Google account so sign up is easy
Coinbase - Free public API for real time crypto price data via websocket, also historical data. With an account you can place orders if you wanted to make a trading bot
Open Secrets - Provides data on pretty much any politicians in Congress, voting records, fundraising, and lobbying
Thanks god they came in. I'm one of those people who always like to break components apart to make it reusable and small.
Quite often I noticed that functional components still want some state to be togglable. This used to be a pain as you either have to transform to class or play football with passing stuff from and to child / parent components.
And now it's all about
const Child = ({prop1, prop2}) => { //useEffect
return smth }
As a benefit setLoading(false) is much more concise than this.setState({ isLoading: false})
As we are approaching the end of 2020 (and hoping that 2021 will be a bit easier on us 😂), I can only recommend to those who are looking to have some interesting read there is a really cool series of building Crash Bandicoot from Andy Gavin (lead developer and designer of the game)
It's pretty long, but extremely interesting.
I'm gonna just quote our CTO here (a really bright individual) regarding those articles:
"This series is the primary reason why I do all this"