Welcome to APIs for normal people (normies)! If you’re a product manager at a software company or anyone who hears “APIs” at work a lot, this tutorial is for you! By the end, you'll have everything you need to test API calls, listen to webhooks and even connect both to a very small web app with a friendly UI.

After each step, you'll be prompted to check the scoreboard below to track your progress in real-time, powered by the magic of APIs! 🪄

Overview

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Advanced user? Skip ahead.

If you’re somewhat familiar with APIs and basic JavaScript programming skip down to the 🔗 Steps To Complete.

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By going through the steps of this guide you will:

Install an API client for testing out APIs. Technically your web browser is an API client but it’s generally only used for GET requests, and it expects HTML to be returned instead of just data, so that it can make a pretty UI. We’ll need a client that can make all kinds of “requests” and show us the data in a “response” in a user friendly way.
Setup a way to “listen” for API calls coming back to you. These incoming API calls are often referred to as webhooks; they’re kind of like turning on notifications for your code.
Install a code editor, also known as a text editor, not unlike Microsoft Word or Apple Pages, but for editing and managing code instead of other kinds of texts. Other basic principles like opening multiple files inside a project folder (directory) still apply.
Install a runtime or a tool for running code on your computer. All computers come with the ability to run some kinds of code but not all languages. We’ll be using JavaScript in our sample code. JavaScript is the language of the web and runs on all web browsers. But to run it on our laptop we’ll need a runtime. We’ll use the popular Node.js runtime.
Finally, we’ll download some sample code and run it to demonstrate how APIs and webhooks are used to create a modern cloud-based application!

🙋🏻 Help

💬 If you have any questions at any time, please:

🤖 ask your favorite AI chatbot for help, like this:

“explain what an API Client is and how to use one to make a POST request”
If that doesn’t help, open an issue on this repository https://github.com/lukevance/product-tech-training or reach out to me via my GitHub profile: https://github.com/lukevance

🔢 Steps to Complete

This tutorial is organized in four parts. After each one, you’ll be prompted to check the leaderboard at the top of this page. If you have the right number of points, you’re ready to move on to the next section! 🎉

1️⃣ Make a basic API call

In this section we’ll install the tools needed to make your first API calls. If you already have these tools and this isn’t your first time, no worries, you’ll breeze through that and then use this tutorial’s API to get your name on the scoreboard.

Part 1: Tools and API Basics