Machine Learning is all the rage these days, and with open source frameworks like TensorFlow developers have access to a range of APIs for using machine learning in their projects. Magenta, a Python library built by the TensorFlow team, makes it easier to process music and image data in particular.

Since I started learning how to code, one of the things that has always fascinated me was the concept of computers artificially creating music. I even published a paper talking about it in an undergrad research journal my freshman year of college.

Let's walk through the basics of setting up Magenta and programmatically generating some simple melodies in MIDI file format.

Installing Magenta

First we need to install Magenta, which can be done using pip. Make sure you create a virtual environment before installing. I am using Python 3.6.5, but Magenta is compatible with both Python 2 and ...

Ever receive a text, probably from an old friend, but you don’t have their number saved? And you’re too embarrassed to ask, “Who is this?”.

Don’t worry. We’ve all been there. But today, we’re here to tell you that we have a solution to avoid this situations! Let's build a small Python app that uses Twilio Lookup and SMS to help you lookup phone numbers over text on the go.

The Tech Stack of Our App

Our app will use two AWS products and two Twilio APIs:

- AWS Lambda: the serverless environment which will hold our functions

- Amazon API Gateway: our API which exposes our Lambda to our Twilio number

- Lookup: to look up the phone number and see who it belongs to

- SMS: to send us a text with the phone number.

Here’s how everything will work together:

1. We’ll send a text ...

If you’re like me, you drool just a little bit over serverless architectures. When Rackspace and AWS EC2 made cloud-based computing a mainstream reality, that was awesome enough. But you still had to spin up and maintain your own virtual servers.

With the introduction of things like Twilio Functions or Lambda for truly serverless function execution, DynamoDB for cached state, and API Gateway for click-and-deploy routing—just to name a few—it’s become deliciously easy to build and deploy powerful (and fun) services in minutes. Seriously, the IoT possibilities are endless!

With that in mind, let’s build something fun with Python – a Serverless SMS Raffle. What if users could text a word to a phone number and were entered in to a raffle? Then when we were ready to choose a winner, we could execute a Lambda to choose some number of winners at random and close ...

Often developers need to deal with data in various different formats and JSON, short for JavaScript Object Notation, is one of the most popular formats used in web development. This is the syntax that the JavaScript language uses to denote objects.

As a Python developer, you may notice that this looks eerily similar to a Python dictionary. There are several different solutions to working with JSON in Python, and more often than not this data is loaded into a dictionary.

For this post, we are going to use the following modified JSON data from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day API. Navigate to where you want to run the example code, create a file called apod.json and add the following to it:

Do you ever have so many things to do that you can’t even decide where to begin? This is me, all the time. So every once in a while, when I’m a bit overwhelmed by all the tasks I have to do, I make my code decide for me. In this tutorial, we’ll build a system that responds to a text with a to-do item. I’m an avid Trello user so we’ll use the Trello API and Twilio API to send tasks via SMS.

First, we have to set our environment up. This guide was written in Python 3.6. If you haven't already, download Python, Pip and Ngrok. Next we will install virtualenv to create and activate your virtual environment by entering the followings command in your command-line:

Next ...

This article will guide beginner Python developers on creating Twitter bots. You will learn the Twitter API while building a your bot and then you will deploy the bot to a cloud platform. The Twitter bot tweets quotes randomly selected from a Random Quotes API service.

Development Environment

To build our Twitter bot, we first need to set up our Python development environment and install the required packages that are needed for us to follow along with this tutorial.

In addition to Python 3, we will be using:

• virtualenv – a development environment
• Requests library – a http library for humans
• Tweepy – an API wrapper for Twitter
• json – a built-in Python library for working with json
• time module – a built-in Python library for working with time

First of all, it is highly recommended and best practice to create a virtual environment before you begin any Python project. We will create a virtual ...

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) can be a great way to programmatically gather or distribute data. API creation really distills down to creating a set of routes that receive requests and return useful data. For example, visiting this page may be easy for a person to read, but it’s harder for a computer program to extract the information it may need. An API can return just the information a program needs.

In this tutorial, we’ll make an API of I Love Dogs, a basic Flask site I created to show cool articles and photos about different types of dogs.

The site is organized by sections the user can visit to learn about different topics. For this API, we’ll create an endpoint so that when a user pings it with a topic they want to get content resources for, it returns a list of resources.

Before we start coding ...

If you are looking for a beginner Twilio project or a new texting buddy, this tutorial is for you!  Using the Twilio and CleverBot APIs you will make a Flask app that texts CleverBot, which is an AI you can chat with that learns from its conversations.

Getting Started

You will need a Twilio account with a phone number that can send and receive SMS.  In the console navigate to the "Buy a Number" page.  Make sure to check off SMS under capabilities and then hit the search button.  Any number will do, so feel free to pick one that speaks to you!

You will also need a CleverBot API key.  You will have to input payment information to use the API.  Luckily, the first month is free!  Just remember to cancel your subscription if you don't plan on using it after this project.

Next, you have to ...

If you're working on an urgent project in GitHub with other developers, it's handy to get immediate notifications by SMS. However, there is no SMS option out of the box! So I said, “Enough is enough; I'll start my own notification system!”

In this tutorial, I'll walk you through the steps of building out the beginnings of a notification system for GitHub pull requests. More specifically, we will use the GitHub and Twilio APIs in Python to send texts notifying you when a new pull request has been submitted.

Getting Started

First, we have to set our environment up. This guide was written in Python 3.6. If you haven't already, download Python and Pip. Next we will install virtualenv to create and activate your virtual environment by entering the followings command in your command-line:

As a new homeowner and dad of two toddlers that leave every light in the house on, I recently switched to Commonwealth Edison’s Hourly Pricing Program, which means I shifted the amount I pay for electricity from a fixed price rate to a variable rate.

Most people pay a fixed rate for the price of electricity. In northern Illinois, it’s 7.2 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), but it’s different for different parts of the country. Many electric companies now offer the option to switch to a variable rate, which is based on the actual real-time market price of energy.

According to ComEd: “These prices vary from hour to hour and day to day according to the actual market price of power. Higher prices are most likely to occur on weekday afternoons during the summer.” Since my wife and I both work, and the kids are at ...