November 2017 — Alexis Rondeau

NoteWednesday, November 29, 2017 · 00:00

Growing Yummy, Hyper-Local Herbs – Adventures In Hydroponics

It’s been a month since I started my own little herb garden at home using Ikea’s Vaxer system.

The short of it is:

It works. Really well.

The whole setup cost me less than $120 and I’ve germinated, sprouted, grown and harvested salad, water-cress and basil in just a few weeks.

I’m a fan and wanted to show you the progress:

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I’m so excited to have more, fresh and tasty greens at my fingertips that I’m going to expand my Ikea system with a custom-made lighting and tray system that I’ll write about in the future.

I strongly believe that growing your own food while living in a big city is a good idea.

Next up: Growing pea, sunflower and hemp microgreens!

Thanks for reading,

Alexis

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NoteMonday, November 20, 2017 · 00:00

Tracking Meetup Growth Rates in Berlin

I’ve meant to build this for months but never got around to it until this weekend.

Basically, out of sheer curiosity, I want to know the fastest-growing Meetups in Berlin. I want to keep a finger on the pulse of this city. For that I find that Meetup memberships are one clear, physical indicator of what people are subscribing to. And what they consider worth their time to eventually meet up for.

So, anyways, I came up with a system that scrapes Berlin’s Meetups every day and calculates the member growth-rate in percent. It allows me to look at the daily report via a simple web UI:

First, the fastest growing Meetups per day…

…and yesterday’s Meetups compared and sorted:

I also added a simple page for each Meetup that summarizes its growth-journey:

A few things I learned

The Meetup API gives me varying responses

The Meetup API responses vary in their results – probably because I’m doing something wrong.

Basically, for Berlin, I have to page through 26 pages of results with 100 Meetups each. That’s about 2,660 Meetups in Berlin.

When I run my job once a day, sometimes I only get 1 page, sometimes 10, sometimes 14 and very rarely the full 26 pages. The API just eventually responds with an empty array on which I finish. I always get 200 OK responses, too, which makes it harder to understand why the variation occurs.

To better understand the issue, I’ve created a monitoring table. If my job isn’t able to fetch the latest data for all 2,660+ Meetups I already know exist, the job is marked as “Incomplete”.

As you can see, two days ago, I fetched all Meetups while the next time I ran the job only 1,400 (14 pages with 100 records each) were returned until the API stopped giving data.

I looked up their terms for fair use and experimented with 5- and 10-second delays between each HTTP request but the responses are still unpredictable.

So, yeah, this probably is all based on how I use their API but between the rate limit documentation which – to my knowledge I’m not over-using – I can’t figure out what the problem is.

Recently created Meetups have a natural growth-burst in their first days

I’ve only had data for the last 4 days but usually the fastest-growing ones were less than a month old. That totally makes sense, the organizer is excited, promotes the Meetup etc.

To counter-point this, I’m looking forward to having more than a week’s worth of data, then a month to compare.

I need more data; and data costs

The value of this is directly related to how much data I can report on. It’ll take at least a week for me to really start using it for real. I think a report on the fastest-growing Meetup in the last month will even be more valuable.

Speaking of data, I quickly exceeded 10,000 rows of the free hobby database on Heroku. I added a $9/mo. mini database on the third day.

Each day, I’m adding ~2,600 Member Count records plus ~2,600 Reporting Cube records to load the UI fast. I guess, that’s 5,200 records per day in total or 156,000 records per month. Nothing crazy but just interesting.