Making Meetup

pairing - Easily use tmux to collaborate with distant friends!

I’ve always enjoyed pair programming. It’s not for everyone but it definitely helps keep me honest about the code I’m writing, and often makes me vastly more productive than I would be on my own. Unfortunately, it can be hard to pair program when your collaborators live in another city (or country).

Erik Osheim, a software engineer on our data team, shares his remote pair-programming rig.

Who can resist a good API?

One of the perks of working for Meetup is that we get a reimbursement for fitness related purchases. I recently used this perk to pick up a wristband activity tracker. One of the unexpected features that came with the wristband’s companion app was an extensive API. I had been meaning to become more familiar with our own API, and this set me to wondering if I could leverage them both in a small project.

After thinking about some practical applications for fitness data I decided on a simple scenario: I am a member of a walking meetup group, and I would like to have my daily step count in my profile. I’d accomplish this by writing a simple shell script that utilized the curl command line tool and run it all on a Raspberry Pi.

(Note: I firmly believe that everyone should have a Raspberry Pi on hand for whimsical side projects).

First I had to get the information I wanted from Jawbone. Using curl to access their API’s /moves endpoint I was able to grab all of my daily activity as JSON. I then ran the results through JQ to isolate the object that contained the daily step count. Once I had the number of steps, I used a stream editor to clean up some unnecessary characters and encoded everything to make it URL friendly.

Now that I had the number of steps ready, I needed a place to put it. I created a dummy group (“The New York Walking Meetup Group”) in our developer environment and gave it a profile question (“How many steps have you taken today?”). I then added a second curl command to the shell script which would update the profile question using the Meetup API’s 2/profile endpoint. I included a little flair to go before and after the step count to make it look nice (“I have taken X steps today!”). Finally, to make sure it updated regularly, I set the script to run every night at 11:55pm.

The result: It works! From my wrist to my Meetup profile with only two APIs and a little ingenuity.