Fun with Ruby and APIs (Github Commit Messages Are Forever)

A 20 minutes tutorial for the Ruby Beginner's Track (http://rubynewby.com/) on using Ruby and the Github API to create madlibs out of your commit messages

Transcript

1. Fun with APIs & Ruby Romeeka Gayhart - Oct 2014 - Boulder Ruby Beginner Track
2. Git Commit Messages are ‘Forever’
3. Romeeka Gayhart QuickLeft @CCandUC Quick Left
4. And today… I’ll be showing you how to make Mad Libs with Ruby and the Github API
5. The Plan • What is Github? • What is an API? • Fetching Data • Making the Program • Showing the Data • How Could We Do It Better?
6. The Plan • What is Github? • What is an API? • Fetching Data • Making the Program • Showing the Data • How Could We Do It Better?
7. The Plan • What is Github? • What is an API? • Fetching Data • Making the Program • Showing the Data • How Could We Do It Better?
8. The Plan • What is Github? • What is an API? • Fetching Data • Making the Program • Showing the Data • How Could We Do It Better?
9. What is Github?
10. What is Github? In English… Github is where you put your code. It allows us to share code, using ‘Git’ And it helps make Open Source work possible
11. A Github Profile (mine)
12. A Github Profile (mine) Me.
13. A Github Profile (mine) Projects or ‘Repos’ I’ve worked on
14. A Github Profile (mine) Public Contribution History
15. A Github Profile (mine) That period of time where I was lazy after gSchool
16. A Github Profile (mine) This is where my work goes. ! ! Both my personal (or ‘Open Source’ work) ! ! And my day job - which you don’t see much of here since it is done in ‘private’ repos
17. What is a Commit Message?
18. What is a Commit Message? Every time you put your code into Git, you add a message.
19. What is a Commit Message? Every time you put your code into Git, you add a message.
20. What is a Commit Message? Every time you put your code into Git, you add a message.
21. What is a Commit Message? Every time you put your code into Git, you add a message.
22. What is a Commit Message? Every time you put your code into Git, you add a message.
23. What is a Commit Message? Commit Messages are really important…. ! They live in ‘Source Control’ forever… ! And believe me. Your future employers will judge you for them…
24. The Plan • What is Github? • What is an API? • Fetching Data • Making the Program • Showing the Data • How Could We Do It Better?
25. What is an API? GUI - Graphical User Interface….
26. What is an API? GUI - Graphical User Interface….
27. What is an API? The API (application programming interface) is basically the computer’s GUI
28. What is an API? The API (application programming interface) is basically the computer’s GUI
29. What is an API? The API (application programming interface) is basically the computer’s GUI Let’s programs use the data easily
30. The Plan • What is Github? • What is an API? • Fetching Data • Making the Program • Showing the Data • How Could We Do It Better?
31. Fetching Data What do we want? A list of commit messages for a user…
32. Fetching Data How do we get to it? Ruby Faraday JSON Faraday is an HTTP client gem Our Favorite Language (JavaScript Object Notation) ! is a lightweight data-interchange format.
33. Let’s Write Some Code…
34. Using the Technology Create a new .rb file…
35. Hitting the Link
36. Hitting the Link Github’s API (in the browser)
37. Hitting the Link Define the URL
38. Hitting the Link Using Faraday to hit the link And using JSON to parse the response
39. Hitting the Link ‘New-up’ our class Print it to the terminal
40. Hitting the Link
41. Hitting the Link
42. Hitting the Link Woah… That’s the first page of every user in Github…! ! We need to be a little more specific….
43. We Need a User! Initialize the class with a username
44. We Need a User! And add that username to the url
45. Our User’s Data
46. Our User’s Data That’s more than we need.! ! So let’s dig in.
47. Using Pry
48. Using Pry
49. Using Pry
50. Using Pry We just hacked into the mainframe…! ! Pry lets you pause the process and play with the results
51. Using Pry
52. Using Pry If it’s a Hash.. then we can use the concept of ‘Keys’ and ‘Values’ to dig in…
53. Hash The Keys
54. Hash The Values
55. Hash The Values Where would you expect to find Commits? ! ! In the ‘Events’
56. The Events Link The result of looking for events is another another link…
57. The Events Link So let’s update our URL to hit that link instead…
58. Fetching Data
59. Fetching Data Let’s run this again with Pry and the new link…
60. Fetching Data Hit Events So how many events do we get?
61. Digging through Events And what do Events looks like?
62. Digging through Events
63. Digging through Events
64. Digging through Events This is ‘Pushing Code’…
65. Digging through Events Are there other types of Events?
66. Grabbing the Push Events
67. Grabbing the Push Events Just grabbing the ‘unique’ events will let us get a clearer picture…
68. Grabbing the Push Events Just grabbing the ‘unique’ events will let us get a clearer picture… We need to isolate the right events in the code…
69. Grabbing the Push Events Let’s move our data fetching to private method
70. Grabbing the Push Events And make a new method that calls it.
71. Grabbing the Push Events fetch_commits is now running the show
72. Grabbing the Push Events And it calls this guy… which goes through the data and selects only the ‘Push Events’
73. Grabbing the Push Events Let’s check this out with Pry…
74. Grabbing the Push Events
75. What’s the Payload? I have a hunch… ! payload sounds important…
76. What’s the Payload?
77. What’s the Payload?
78. What’s the Payload?
79. Collecting the Payload Another method to pull the ‘Payload’
80. Collecting the Commits And now a method to pull the commits…
81. Collecting the Commits Notice that fetch_commits is really growing
82. Collecting the Commits
83. Collecting the Commits
84. Collecting the Commits Now remember… what we really want are just the messages…
85. Collecting the Commits This gets a little tricky. A Hash inside an Array?!
86. Collecting the Commits Time for another method… And some Ruby magic
87. Collecting the Commits There we go… a clean commit
88. Collecting Messages Finally… the messages
89. Collecting Messages
90. The Plan • What is Github? • What is an API? • Fetching Data • Making the Program • Showing the Data • How Could We Do It Better?
91. Making the Program Let’s not cram all the code into one file though… ! Think about it… What is the purpose of User Commits? ! To get commits… ! And what is the purpose of our program?…
92. Making the Program Let’s not cram all the code into one file though… ! Think about it… What is the purpose of User Commits? ! To get commits… ! And what is the purpose of our program?…
93. Making the Program Make the Class
94. Make the Class Notice that we don’t need to require ‘JSON’ or ‘Faraday’ But we do need to require our User Commits…
95. Accessing the Commits
96. Accessing the Commits And since this happens here - we can remove it from User Commits as well…
97. Accessing the Commits But why does it look like this?
98. Accessing the Commits We need to actually call the method in UserCommits to get our messages
99. Accessing the Commits We want to keep our code clean - so let’s move this idea to its own method - down in private
100. Accessing the Commits We also want to keep our username accessible. But let’s keep it private too
101. Printing the Plain Messages
102. We’re back to where we were!…. ! Yay?
103. So what do you need to make Madlibs? ! Words…
104. Making the Program Let’s define some common nouns from Commit Messages
105. Making the Program And some common verbs…
106. Making the Program Now… do the same and create ‘replacement_nouns’ and ‘replacement_verbs’
107. Swap Words Right now our plain messages are sentences. But what we want to split apart the words
108. Swap Words downcase - converts all messages to lower case split - splits a string into an array. The default character that it splits on is a space
109. Swap Words
110. Swap Words Now let’s create a method to replace nouns and verbs
111. Swap Words
112. Swap Words Let’s see if the word matches a replaceable noun And if so… replace it!
113. Swap Words Let’s see if the word matches a replaceable noun And if so… replace it!
114. Swap Words We’ll do the same for verbs… And either way… return the word
115. Swap Words What are we getting back? An Array…
116. Swap Words What are we getting back? An Array…
117. Swap Words Let’s join the Array back into a String
118. Did it work? Not so fast. Don’t want to ruin the surprise yet…
119. Did it work? Not so fast. Don’t want to ruin the surprise yet… Let’s first clean up how the data is displayed…
120. The Plan • What is Github? • What is an API? • Fetching Data • Making the Program • Showing the Data • How Could We Do It Better?
121. Showing the Data Remember this? Not too fancy…
122. Showing the Data That’s a little better…
123. So now…. ! The results…
125. IT WORKED!!!
126. IT WORKED!!! But will it work on anyone?
127. Let’s Try with the Man in Charge of the Beginner’s Track
129. And our event coordinator….
131. This is my favorite.. ever…
132. Sweet, Sweet Success…
133. The Plan • What is Github? • What is an API? • Fetching Data • Making the Program • Showing the Data • How Could We Do It Better?
134. Test First!
135. Test First! Use MiniTest Or use RSPEC
136. Test First! Use MiniTest Or use RSPEC It doesn’t matter… just test
137. Test It! Use MiniTest Or use RSPEC It doesn’t matter… just test Thing about a month from now.. if I come back to this project
138. Test First! Use MiniTest Or use RSPEC It doesn’t matter… just test Thing about a month from now.. if I come back to this project How the heck can I change anything? I won’t know what will break everything.
139. Test First! Use MiniTest Or use RSPEC It doesn’t matter… just test Thing about a month from now.. if I come back to this project How the heck can I change anything? I won’t know what will break everything. And I won’t understand why I wrote the code the way I did…
140. Test First! Use MiniTest Or use RSPEC It doesn’t matter… just test Thing about a month from now.. if I come back to this project How the heck can I change anything? I won’t know what will break everything. And I won’t understand why I wrote the code the way I did… I’ll spend more time trying to figure it out than I spent writing the code…
141. Test First! Use MiniTest Or use RSPEC It doesn’t matter… just test That’s EXACTLY what happened to me when I tried to get the code ready for this presentation.
142. Test First! Use MiniTest Or use RSPEC It doesn’t matter… just test And if you want someone to help you with your code…! ! You better have tests…
143. The Dangers of Hardcoding
144. The Dangers of Hardcoding Remember me?
145. The Dangers of Hardcoding The first few times you play the github madlibs it’ll be funny…
146. The Dangers of Hardcoding The first few times you play the github madlibs it’ll be funny… But ‘replaces butt’ will lose its charm eventually…
147. The Dangers of Hardcoding The first few times you play the github madlibs it’ll be funny… But ‘replaces butt’ will lose its charm eventually…
148. The Dangers of Hardcoding You’ll want to change the words around. ! And it’s not great to have those words be hardcoded into your class.
149. The Dangers of Hardcoding Think about using things like: A simple database A config file Heck even reading and writing to a CSV…
150. And finally… You can make it a whole lot prettier
151. Pretty It Up Even if you aren’t ready to make an entire website for your commits…. The terminal has lots of styling tools.
152. Pretty It Up There are also general Coding Standards around what a Command Line Interface Tool should present to the user. IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition Checkout this document if you’re interested…
153. But still… Not too bad a result for just a little bit of Ruby….
154. There is a world of data out there that we can access with simple code! ! Let’s go make the world a better (and more fun) place!
155. Thank You! Romeeka Gayhart! @CCandUC! ! github.com/rrgayhart