Catching Tweets with Django+REST

Users on Twitter generate lots of data that could be used for a million different purposes. Django and REST are amazing tools that handle large amounts of content. That’s a match made in heaven. Imagine what a developer could accomplish by combining these technologies. The sky is the limit.

Have you ever followed a hashtag and had a crazy idea of what you could do with those tweets but didn’t know how to do it? This workshop will show you how to set up everything you need to store this data using Django, REST, and the Twitter API.

What will you learn? API: best practices and how to approach an API as a product. Django+REST: setting up an app, storing and using data it. Twitter: the structure of a tweet (seems pretty straight forward but a the 140 characters are just the tip of the iceberg). What’s a stream and how to listen to it.

At the end of this workshop you’ll be able to store tweets tracking a hashtag or a user. What you’ll do with this data is completely up to you but we’ll dedicate some time to discuss examples and ideas of what kind of fun projects you can create.

For this tutorial we’ll need computers with Python and Virtualenv that can handle the latest version of Django and REST. I’ve had experience tracking hashtags, for several days at a time, for campaigns done for GM Mexico. The last one was on Mother’s day in which users would write a lovely tweet for their mom and the system will generate a postcard with the message as a gift.