{
  "id": 14119566,
  "title": "I built 8 small dev APIs (furigana, romaji, postal address, holidays, QR codes…)",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/13/i-built-8-small-dev-apis-furigana-romaji-postal-address-holidays-qr",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-13T04:40:56.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/member_3b7e8758/i-built-8-small-dev-apis-furigana-romaji-postal-address-holidays-qr-codes-4b0m"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "When building a product that involves Japanese language features or requires QR codes, developers often face numerous small tasks that can be frustrating and time-consuming. To simplify these common challenges, the author created eight separate APIs, all available on RapidAPI. These APIs cover a range of functionalities, including furigana conversion, romaji conversion, postal code to address lookup, holidays and calendar data, text normalization, and QR code generation.\n\nEach of these APIs offers a free tier and is easily accessible through a simple REST interface. Developers can integrate these services into their applications without needing to install any additional SDKs. The author provides example code snippets demonstrating how to use each API, such as converting a postal code into an address, generating furigana from Japanese text, and creating a QR code with customizable options like size, color, and error correction level.\n\nBy offloading these routine tasks to APIs, developers can streamline their workflows and focus on more critical aspects of their projects. The author emphasizes that using these APIs not only saves time but also keeps the frontend and backend of applications lean and efficient. The complete list of APIs along with a live demo is available at https://claude.ai/artifact/JFqUDGK5PQ3nRYR9CFoTCB for anyone interested in trying them out.",
  "summary": "If you've ever shipped a product that touches Japanese — or just needed a QR code without pulling in a library — you keep hitting the same small-but-annoying jobs: adding reading hints (furigana) to kanji, autocompleting an address from a postal code, counting characters properly , tokenizing text for search, normalizing full/half-width input, or generating a QR code. I turned these into 8 small…",
  "key_points": [
    "Author created eight APIs for Japanese language features and QR codes.",
    "APIs cover furigana, romaji, postal code lookup, holidays, normalization, and QR generation.",
    "Free tier available via REST interface with example code snippets."
  ],
  "editors_take": "Offloading routine Japanese language and utility tasks to specialized APIs allows developers to streamline their workflows and maintain leaner application architectures by focusing on more critical project features.",
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}