Can I Code Against an API to Learn a Product?

“Can I learn how to use the product my company sells by interfacing with its API?” That was the question I asked myself when I started at OpenDNS in the marketing department. Having learned and used Python in business school, I decided to create an application that would monitor my organization’s DNS queries and email me a daily list of all new domains. This talk walks you through my journey of re-familiarizing myself with Python, interoperating with a new product’s API, and massaging the results into a daily alert. The end goal: to create something useful to reference for future development, to learn about the API, and to impress my colleagues - many of whom have no idea that I’m doing this in the first place. In my talk, I will provide examples of my logic, coding decisions, and any other stumbling blocks I ran into along the way in the hopes that attendees will take the plunge and hack away at something cool to further their knowledge.