Day: September 10, 2018

#ICYDK: We use Google Chat internally a lot to communicate across our team — it’s kinda like our slack. We also create a lot of content that is accessible via RSS feeds, we even have a team feed that you can all view. It wasn’t until recently that I found out that it was pretty easy to create a simple post-only bot via Webhooks, and that gave me the idea: I can create a simple service that polls RSS feeds and then sends them to our Webhook that can post directly in to our team chat.

It was pretty simple in the end, and I’ve included all the code below. I used Firebase functions — I suspect that this is just as easy on other Function-as-a-service sites — and Superfeedr. Superfeedr is a service that can listen to Pubsubhubbub pings (now WebSub) and it will also poll RSS feeds that don’t have Pubsub set up. Then, when it finds a feed, it will ping a configured URL (in my case my Cloud Function in Firebase) with an XML or JSON representation of the newly found feed data — all you have to do is parse the data and do something with it. https://goo.gl/BhHdnH #DataIntegration #ML

#ICYMI: So you may be in charge of an API. Perhaps you are about to dive into making one and are excited to get started. But be careful, because good API design can be hard.

There are lots of things to think about when it comes to designing a good API. Unlike with designing web user interfaces, you may not know all your clients’ use cases. Or you may have a variety of clients on different platforms. This difficulty gets amplified if you choose to roll your own conventions over choosing an existing paradigm. Don’t do this. You risk spending a good chunk of your time thinking about unimportant things and skimping over the important ones. https://goo.gl/9gbHBC #DataIntegration #ML