Today I learned how to pip!
Not in the sense of using it as a package manager, that’s water well under the bridge. I learned how to pip to share what I’m doing and contribute to the open source community, and it feels fantastic!

I’ve been working on my job search, and I have been using Trello for the purpose of organization and record keeping. If you aren’t familiar with it I suggest you check it out. It’s a simple, clean, and incredibly flexible hub for organization of anything you can think of. What’s better is they have a great API and there is a good stable python wrapper for interacting with it.
Given all that, I wanted to create a simple command line tool to act as a pipeline from a glass door job listing, to a consistent, organized, and feature rich addition to the trello board of my choosing.

I came up with trellogd.

I released the tool in a very basic form last week, and today I got around to getting it up on PyPi so that anyone who wants to use Trello for their job search has an easy tool to accomplish that.

The build was pretty straightforward. Nothing too crazy. It was a great opportunity to learn more about git/Github, setuptools, web-scraping, API’s, and of course argparse. I found that building command line tools is fun and can be tremendously handy. Right now the scope of what this tool is capable of is rather limited, see the README for more details on usage, but I have a list of stuff I’d like to add:

• Expand the functionality to work with alternate listings on glass door
• Add additional job listing sites
• increase automation via a bookmarklet, browser extension or an automator app.

Nothing particularly earth shattering or DataSciencey, but it was a good opportunity for several things to happen:

• Further round out my Python skill set
• Gain a better understanding of how applications are built and shipped
• Make an efficient, automated solution for a problem I currently face regularly

If I had to come up with the biggest challenge I faced within this project I think it would probably be finding the right python wrapper for the api. I spent longer than I should have trying to figure out/ completely re-write py-trello. Which I believe is an auto generated wrapper. They have the best name and the top spot on PyPi which is a shame, because the code doesn’t work. biggest lesson to takeaway from that (and one that is re-enforced a lot) if something seems screwey or doesn’t make sense, do some more searching. Ten minutes more research may well save you hours.

I am trying to focus more on contributing to my Github. It’s rather sparse, despite the hundreds of hours I’ve put into python. I really need to push a lot more to not only share what I’m doing with the open source community, but to prove myself capable as a developer and a Data Scientist. Lots more like this to come!