We Built You a Playground (and It’s Open Source)!
It doesn’t have swings or a giant slide — but we think it will be a fun place to play. With APIs.
We here at Best Buy have long known that students and teachers use our APIs in the classroom and for coursework. Whether it is in post-secondary courses, at code schools, or in on-the-job skills training we think this is great! People learning how to create and use APIs! Yay! We care about students, we care about APIs — the two go great together. We also recognize that our APIs aren’t ideal for the API beginner (we don’t always follow clean API standards), so we created the Best Buy API Playground — an open source, self-contained API that you can use locally as a tutorial, sandbox, and place to learn more about working with RESTful APIs.
With all that teachers and trainers need to do, we wanted to help lighten the load a little. The Best Buy API Playground is designed to be a teaching tool that makes use of solid API standards and best practices — so you know that you are learning and teaching from a tool that can be built on. API Playground is simple to set up and allows learners of all stripes to start exploring and creating quickly. Our API Playground includes a rich dataset of product and store-related information — 50k+ products and store information in a JSON schema based on real data from the Best Buy catalog — making it easy for teaching and learning about APIs (because Lorem Ipsum can only take you so far when you are mastering new coding skills).
Best Buy’s API Playground is available for free from GitHub for you to clone, install and get working quickly in your local environment. Because we are fans of good open source stuff, especially tools that are flexible and intuitive, we used the Feathers Framework to create the Playground. Heck, we even put in both Swagger documentation and a Postman collection — tools that allow you to play with the data without understanding what a curl command might be — so you (or your students) can start playing as soon as the recess bell rings!
Drop us a line and let us know what you think at developer@bestbuy.com. Or, if you want more information about our production APIs, check out developer.bestbuy.com.
