You’ve probably heard the term API thrown around. It stands for Application Programming Interface, which doesn’t really help. Here’s what it actually means.

An API is a way for one program to talk to another program. Think of it like a restaurant menu. You don’t go into the kitchen and cook your own food. You look at the menu, make a request, and the kitchen sends back what you ordered. An API is the menu. Your program is the customer. Someone else’s server is the kitchen.

CryptoBlocks has Web blocks that let you make API requests. Let’s say there’s a public API that returns random jokes. You’d use the “fetch URL” block, point it at the joke API, and when you run your program, it sends a request to that API and gets a joke back. Your program can then display the joke, save it, do whatever you want with it.

This is how modern apps work. Weather apps don’t measure the temperature themselves. They request data from a weather API. Social media apps don’t store every user on your device. They request profile data from the company’s API. Everything is connected through these request-and-response systems.

The Web blocks in CryptoBlocks let you experiment with real APIs without writing complicated network code. Drag out a fetch block, paste in a URL, handle the response. You’re making the same kind of requests that professional developers make, just with a visual interface.

Once you understand APIs, the whole internet makes more sense. It’s not magic. It’s just programs talking to each other.