Data stored in Excel spreadsheets can be hard to read with anything other than Excel and it’s especially tough to compare two specific datasets within all that data. One possible solution is Python. It can do the dirty work of finding the information for us while also being pretty fun. In this post we will read NBA statistics from a Microsoft Excel sheet using the Openpyxl… Read More
Image recognition can seem like a pretty daunting technical challenge. Scraping images to use as training data for a machine learning model stresses me out. That’s where Clarifai comes in. This API is great for implementing image recognition so you can focus on the core functionality of what you are building. Let’s build a Flask application in Python with Twilio MMS to receive picture messages over a phone… Read More
It’s easy to use the Twilio API to send and receive SMS using Python and Bottle. What if we convert that traditional web application into a serverless application using Amazon Web Services’ API Gateway and AWS Lambda? Interested in learning how to create a serverless Python application? Great, because we’re going to build a serverless API for Twilio SMS throughout this post. What Problem Are We Trying to… Read More
University students know the pain of trying to register for a class only to realize it’s full. At my university we didn’t even have a waitlist system for most classes. We had to resort to logging in and checking the site multiple times a day. This seemed like something a computer could do, so I set out to automate it with a bit of Python and… Read More
Your bank may let you set up SMS alerts for various triggers. It might even give you the option of receiving periodic spending summaries via SMS (mine doesn’t though!). But what about a daily SMS summary of your spending across all your accounts? This summary is harder to come by, but thankfully you can roll your own by combining Plaid, an easy to use financial services API… Read More
One day during my wife’s first pregnancy, it dawned on me that a lot of people would be interested to know when the baby was born. I began counting all the family members and friends who would want some notification about the baby’s arrival and realized I’d be making more phone calls than I would prefer. Sure, I could shove everyone into one big group text… Read More
You know when you’re selling out stadiums and want to connect with your fans one-on-one but can’t exactly give out your personal phone number? Yeah, common problem — for Zac Brown & his band. Zac Brown Band has about 1.67 million Twitter followers. The ZBB squad wanted to reach out to every fan before dropping their new record (which came out today). Dialing up 1.67 million… Read More
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda is a usage-based service that can run arbitrary Python 3.6 code in response to developer-defined events. For example, if a new JPEG file is uploaded to AWS S3 then AWS Lambda can execute Python code to respond to resize the image on S3. Let’s learn how to use AWS Lambda with a manual test event trigger to send outbound text messages via a Python Lambda… Read More
NASA has a bunch of awesome APIs which give you programmatic access to the wonders of space. I think the Mars Rover Photos API in particular is really amazing as you can use it to see what kind of pictures the Mars Curiosity rover has been taking. Let’s build an app using the Mars Rover API with Twilio MMS, Python and Flask to make it so that we… Read More