TopCoder

I have recently begun to do code challenges from TopCoder.

I first heard of TopCoder from John Sonmez here: So You Want to Become a Better Programmer? (TopCoder).

I started by doing the archived problems here. The problems are sorted by the percent of competitors who were able to solve them–basically in order of difficulty.

The questions can be fun but a few of them are impossible for me to understand and the interface requires a very large monitor for me to see everything. But overall it has benefited me because I get to attempt to understand a requirement, pass tests, then look at successful and cleanly written code from past competitors.

 

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Legend of Korra Benders

Legend of Korra Benders

This used AngularJS to sort The Legend of Korra characters by their bending abilities. This site demonstrates AngularJS features such as JSON, Factories, and Routes.

Translator

Translator

This site uses the Yandex API for translation. JavaScript functions allow translations to occur without a page reload.

Clock

Clock

This clock displays the time and city. This site uses the Telize API to ascertain the current city by the IP address and JavaScript functions to detect and display the browser’s current time.

Thanks to Prashanth for information about the Telize API and credit goes to SitePoint for the clock designs.

Find Recipes

Find Recipes

Enter an ingredient and get recipes and nutritional information instantly. This was made using the Edamam’s Recipe Search and Diet API which provides access to over 1.5 million recipes from over 500 sites.

This was my second time using an API. I learned much from Apps from scratch. This time was different because I kept getting an error messages until I realized that I had to use JSONP instead of JSON. I also had to use a callback function to prevent errors.

Weather Now

Weather Now

Enter a city and find out its current temperature. This was made using the Open Weather Map API (Application Programming Interface) which provided data in the JSON format.

Special thanks to bloggers Omar for helping me get started with this API and Prashanth for helping me make sense of the JSON.

I feel great about getting started with this API. I feel like I have cracked open the door to the wide world of APIs, and I am excited about the future of learning, playing, and exploring even more…