Streaming Questions From The Stack Exchange API

If you are a developer, you probably spend a lot of time on Stack Overflow. It is where you find answers to many of the questions you encounter in your daily work. All of the questions and the answers behind Stack Overflow can be accessed via the Stack Exchange API. Making this API a pretty rich source of content for streaming, and being made available in real-time, delivering the activity that occurs via the platform to developers when it occurs, and not waiting for when developers are just looking for the answers.

The best place to start with Stack Exchange is with the questions API. Where you can sort questions by activity and whether it is hot, however, the best part is that you can get at the results without actually needing to authenticate with a key. To proxy the Stack Exchange API using Streamdata.io, all you need is this basic cURL command:

curl -v "https://streamdata.motwin.net/https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/questions?order=desc&sort=activity&site=stackoverflow&X-Sd-Token=[your streamdata.iotoken]"

Then you are streaming questions live from Stack Overflow. Giving you the latest questions being asked via the Stack Overflow platform. You can further dial in the results by using the tagged parameter, where you can pass in up to five tags, and filter the results by specific keywords. Turning your Streamdata.io generated Stack Overflow streams into more topical streams, allowing developers to tune into specific topics that are interesting to them.

We are pretty excited about the opportunity for streaming content around the Stack Exchange API, especially because it doesn’t require any API keys to fire up. Its high volume of activity, diverse range of topical content, and easy access makes it a pretty amazing target for showcasing the potential of streaming. We are going to play around with some of the other API paths Stack Exchange offers and see what other magic we can make happen–then share the story here on the blog, so stay tuned!