BlueJeans Project

Using APIs are one of the most practical skills to have as a web developer in today’s society. As a student employee of the University of Hawai’i, our team worked together to integrate the school’s advising system to the BlueJeans API .

This project has taught me a plethora of valuable skills for the future. The most important skills acquired were teamwork/communication as well as the process of working with REST APIs. Working together as a team has improved my confidence for working with APIs for the first time.

APIs sounded familiar to me prior to this project since I had researched some potential project ideas for the future during senior year of high school. While brainstorming the application, I figured that there needed to be a way to store user data for the application in the database, and that’s when I found the Firebase API. Not going to lie, API’s seemed intimidating prior to this project since they seemed like something that required a vast amount of knowledge to use. The truth is, there is not much difference to an API than calling helper method (getters/setters) that you may create for a class, something most students have done in intro ICS courses. The only thing you need to do is to read the documentation carefully and experiment! APIs can be tricky but the more experience you can get with them, the more fun they will become and the more knowledge you gain!