Towards the end of the Launch School core syllabus, we start to work with API calls. These allow us to pass information between servers. It turns out, this is really useful to be able to do.
Many if not most of the things you do online involve API calls. That little widget on the side of the web page that shows today's weather: an API call. Even things like Siri which aren't exactly web pages: using API calls.
Being able to make those calls and to interact with the services available through the internet gives users all sorts of power. The creativity comes, then, in how these things are all combined together.
That said, the dreams of the connected web have been somewhat oversold in the past. What are we on now, web 4.0?.
From a technical perspective, in this part of the course I enjoyed seeing how simple text in the form of JSON objects was behind so much of our communication and interactivity online these days. (All the more reason to have more secure ways of exchanging those plain text data).
I was also conscious of how much creativity and widened thinking has gone into expanding the possibilities of what HTML, CSS and a bit of JavaScript can do over the internet. Some of these capabilities mean that we're straining the possibilities in this area or that, but above all I take away some inspiration in how people made do with what they had instead of feeling like they needed to reinvent the wheel.