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Forecasting the Weather in Ruby

Posted on by Emily Chapman
I’ve just finished my first month of the three-month SkillCrush Ruby on Rails blueprint. That means that I’ve just finished learning the rudiments of Ruby and Git—next month we’ll move on to simple Ruby web frameworks, before rounding out month three with an immersion into Ruby on Rails.

As my capstone project for this first month, I’ve written code that asks you for your zip code, and—using the Yahoo Weatherman gem—tells you the weather conditions, high, and low for the next five days. It’s not the most exciting app in the world (what learning-to-code project is?), but it’s more code—and specifically more Ruby—than I would have ever thought I could write this time last year.

Check out the weather forecast script on Github.

Continue reading →

Send Emails, Update Trello Using Trolly and Mandrill

Posted on by Emily Chapman
Recently, I’ve taken on some additional tasks at work. Chief among them has been reaching out to users for interviews—I ask them about pain points and favorite features, record the sessions, and then write up notes.

The start of every one of those sessions, however, is emailing a user to see if they’d be interested in talking to me. It only took sending a few of those (basically identical) emails for me to wonder if I could automate the process—it turns out I can.

I’ve written a bit of Python that takes a first name, last name, email address, and company name for a user. It then substitutes that information into a stock email script, sends the email through Mandrill, and makes a card on a Trello board containing the user’s name and company (to which I’m assigned as a member). It uses Trolly (a Python wrapper for Trello) and Mandrill’s official Python wrapper.

I’ve uploaded a Gist of the script here (you can ever see the script that I use for the emails): interview-request.py. Continue reading →