[Baypiggies] How to download all my Meetup activity for 2012, 2013 from Meetup API?

[Glen Jarvis]

I do API work a LOT. Each one is different and each one has it's own joys and wrinkles.

My tip -- make a stab at the very first "laughably small goal" -- ignore the big elephant you are trying to eat (one byte at a time ;).  Instead, try to hammer out/focus in that first mouthful -- get a successful connection.

The first stab won't be kept -- you can iterate to make it something you will keep. So, it's okay if there are hard coded username and passwords (if you have that option). Or, if the only access is Oauth, it's okay to manually get a cookie and hard code that cookie.

The objective -- getting started. Get a small piece to work. Then begin refactoring that small piece to something that can be checked in and withstand code review/pull request/etc.

I bet if you can get this far you either answer this question, or find you have a more specific question about something that your stuck on. Then you can have a specific snippet of code that you can send and ask about.

Hopefully this small tip helps. If you ever get stuck and can't get chewing on this first mouthful, then I'd ask another engineer to Pair Program with you (there are even hireable services like AirPair) with this first, specific, goal -- successfully connect and access.

Glen
P.S. If all APIs end up being a dead end (which I don't think is likely), you can always build this from scratch (as a scraper -- less efficient/a little more fragile; but works very well) with "requests"and "beautiful soup" packages  it's surprisingly easier than you think -- it just takes time. 

P.S.S. If you only want the data and not a clean project to maintain, you can hire out: Elance, Mechanical Turk, virtual personal assistance via task rabbit, etc.

> On Apr 16, 2014, at 11:25 PM, Stephen <spmcinerney at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Anyone have tips on the doing the following in Python?
> 
> I want to download all (past, historical) Meetups I either attended or was
> waitlisted for, in all (81!) Meetup groups I subscribe to (or at least a large subset
> of them), for all of calendar 2012, and then all of calendar 2013.
> I then want to filter out selected Meetup groups, and reassemble the rest by date
> into one big CSV file for 2012, and another for 2013.
> Ideally for each event it should list date, group, title, time, location of meetup.
> 
> Meetup have a Python API . This wrapper though is not useful:
> https://github.com/meetup/python-api-client
> 
> I also see this code out there from our NYC brethren:
> https://github.com/NYCPython/nycpython.com
> 
> Short of splicing together all the pages for 65 groups * 12 months * 2 years,
> and reordering by date, any ideas?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Stephen
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