The Setup (usesthis.com) API

There’s a really interesting site usesthis.com AKA “The Setup” which interviews people and lists all of the gear that they use, including software. I found out that they have an API, (documented here) and I wanted to use my new API skills in Python to test it out! This one returns JSON unlike the NPR API that returned XML.

Basically what I did is use the list API to return all of the interviews of people that use Python, then used the interviews API to return each of those people’s lists of gear. That way, i could tally up the most-frequently-used software (other than Python) used by the interviewed Python users!

Here’s my code in HTML IPython notebook form. I haven’t had a chance to practice visualizations yet, so please point me to any resources that will help me make the horizontal bar chart prettier!

UsesThis API – Software that Python users use

Preview of the ugly chart:
sw_ppl_that_use_python_use

Update 6/18/15:
What about other software? I added an input so the user can type in any software title. For the output saved below, I typed in “Android” at the prompt.

Here it is on nbviewer. You can use the download button in the upper right corner to download it and run it on your local IPython installation to try it out yourself!
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/paix120/78985108a55a9b32ff8c

Posted by on Jun 10, 2015 in #SoDS, python | 1 comment

1 Comment

  1. Leonid
    Aug 12, 2015

    Hi, nice site,

    for data visualization just use d3.js, it is really cool javascript library to make graphs and other visualization stuff. I would like to make a library on top of d3.js for creating some reusable charts for data scientists, just to make the life easier for everyone.

    Leonid..