That's perfectly fine for the beginning stages of an apps development but as your application grows it's very normal and it's probably going to be a pretty standard process for you to start communicating with outside APIs. Now if you've never heard of an API before, it stands for Application Programming Interface, and it allows you to have a direct communication line with an outside application or an outside server.

So in this case what we're going to be able to do is we're going to start bringing in portfolio items and that's what this section is gonna be all about, it's seeing how we can communicate with an outside API, how we can grab items and render them on the screen and also how we can create items and start using forms.

So this is gonna be really cool and this is gonna be one of the most powerful ways that you can be building applications because no longer are we limited to just hardcoded data but now we're actually going to be able to start connecting to outside systems.

When I started putting this course together I realized that I wanted to give you the ability to have a clean interface where you could go and you could see your API data, you could see the different links that you can connect to and hopefully will make it as straight forward as possible to understand.

So I created this website called devcamp.space. So you can go to this devcamp.space and you can sign up for a free account, so you can fill out your email, subdomain which this is important, your subdomain should be something like your name, something like that. Make sure you don't have any spaces or anything like that, then your password, and then confirm your password, and hit register.

What this is going to do, the purpose of this application is it's going to give you a central repository for all of your data in a real world environment. So say that after you finish going through this course or this track and you get a job and you start building out your own react and JavaScript applications, you're most likely gonna be working with a team and they're going to give you API credentials.

They're gonna tell you how you're gonna connect to outside services and so what the goal of this system is, is it gives you the ability to replicate that process. So for this video I wanna make it very simple, simply go sign up for an account, I already have an account right here, and then register or log in, and in the next guide, we'll start walking through this system.

Resources

• DevCamp Space