HACKER Q&A
📣 zevaverbach

What API should I build a realtime data viz on top of this week?


I’m about to have a rare childless week of vacation in a boring town with decent internet access, and I’d like your advice for what to work on!

I’m a senior-ish full stack dev (Python + React) and I’m interested in getting some experience with real-time data viz using Highcharts or AG Charts.

I don’t want to get bogged down in scraping but other than that I’m open to any suggestions for the project as far as:

    - data source
    - what protocol to use
    - whether to do JAM or SSR 
    - aesthetics/styling
Please don’t tell me to “take it easy”, I already knocked that out in the first part of vacay. :-)

  👤 tycoon177 Accepted Answer ✓
I'm not sure if you're in the US, but there are a lot of data sources at https://data.gov/ that are pretty interesting! A similar service may be available for other countries.

If you want to really get out of your comfort zone, I would suggest a new language/paradigm. I've recently been loving learning Elixir with Phoenix liveview. It fills a lot of the full-stack needs and lets you focus on your backend data and your frontend display.

👤 exod983
If you stick to React, make sure to also check out https://www.tremor.so/ https://raw.tremor.so/, which is built on top of Recharts. Beautiful defaults, easy API.
👤 jbernsteiniv
The USDA has an awesome API called Food Data Central. The data is public domain in terms of licensing and the rate limit is about 1000 calls per hour per IP address (which is extremely reasonable especially for early testing).

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/api-guide.html

👤 jzombie
Maybe build something to do stock (or crypto, or some other market) analysis of some sort?