Show HN: StartupGuild Hackethon - Yammer API + Gmaps API - Member Locator | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: StartupGuild Hackethon - Yammer API + Gmaps API - Member Locator

sg.mbrochh.com

23 pointsjv222226 comments

Martin here. That is true. Polling the yammer API for retrieving all members is quite slow, also polling Googles geolocation API for getting lat/lng coordinates from address strings is slow and the rate limit would be exceeded in no time if I did it in real-time.

Therefore I scheduled a cronjob to update the database every hour. The yammer API gives 50 users per request, with our 500 members (and still growing rapidly) I need 10 requests already, each taking around a second or two. Polling the Google geolocation API is even slower, but since I save all results and since everyone seems to live in New York (*g), I rarely have to poll it any more.

Oh. This is my first post on HN. Being a daily reader since about 2 years I think. Awesome site with awesome content! Definetly changed my life :)

I built this because I wanted to know if there are any other Entrepreneurs near my place in Singapore.

I never used OAuth before and I never leveraged any well known API before (like Facebook or Twitter). Usually I use Python/Django for all my web projects but I felt that a full blown Django stack would be overkill here. So I googled for "python mini web framework" and eventually found "web.py".

With the help of the tutorial I got a prototype running quickly (3 hours or so). Another 10 hours have been consumed by the creation of my hourly database-updater (a simple Python script). Another 5 hours were killed by the creation of the client side JavaScript and all those pitfalls when it comes to asynchronous programming, callbacks and closures. I guess around 2 hours went into HTML/CSS issues.

Ah one more thing: I would probably have given up half way without this neat python-jammer-oauth project on github: https://github.com/lemonad/python-yammer-oauth

Chances are we can help you. Mind posting what you need from the API to the Yammer Developer Network or opening a support ticket?

Opened a feature request ticket... tried to get into the Yammer Developer Network a week ago but it seems as if my application does not get approved...

I think it should be mentioned that the map shows the locations of the members of the StartupGuild, based on the location field in their profile. Members who have not supplied a location (or entered something like "Down at the beach"), obviously don't appear on the map. According to Martin, who created the map, the data is updated (via a cronjob) once per hour.

I'm apparently the only one from Seattle.

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