Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through this thing I was messing with called “adquirio.” It sounds fancy, but trust me, it was a whole lotta trial and error.
First off, what was I trying to do? Basically, I wanted to pull some data from an API and then automatically update a spreadsheet with that info. Seemed straightforward enough, right? Wrong!
Getting Started (The Easy Part…Sort Of): So, I started by installing the “requests” library in Python. You know, the one you use for making API calls. That was smooth. Then, I got my API key and figured out the URL I needed. This part was mostly copy-pasting from the API documentation. I felt like a real hacker at this point.
Hitting the API (Where Things Started to Get Funky): I wrote a simple script to hit the API and print the JSON response. Boom! Got some data. But wait… it was nested like crazy! Like, dictionaries inside lists inside dictionaries. I spent a good hour just trying to figure out how to navigate that mess. I ended up using a bunch of for loops and if statements to dig down to the data I actually needed. It was messy, but it worked. Kinda.
Working with the Spreadsheet (Oh, the Pain): Okay, so now I had the data. Time to get it into the spreadsheet. I chose to use “openpyxl” because it seemed the most popular option. Installing it was easy, of course. But then I started trying to actually write to the spreadsheet. First, I had to learn how to open the workbook, select the right sheet, and figure out which cells to write to. Then, I had to loop through my data and write each value to the correct cell. Sounds simple, but I kept getting errors about data types and cell formatting. I spent another hour just Googling error messages and trying different things until something finally stuck.
Automating the Process (The Grand Finale): Now that I had a script that could pull data and update the spreadsheet, I wanted to automate it. I used the `schedule` library to make it run every day at a specific time. I had to set up a cron job on my server to actually execute the script, which was a whole other adventure involving SSH and cryptic command-line arguments. I screwed it up multiple times and almost locked myself out of my server. But eventually, I got it working.
Lessons Learned:
- API documentation is your friend (even if it’s confusing).
- Nested data is a pain in the butt.
- Spreadsheet libraries are powerful, but require patience.
- Automation is awesome, but setting it up can be a headache.
Final Thoughts: This whole “adquirio” thing was a lot harder than I expected, but I learned a ton. I now have a script that automatically updates my spreadsheet with the latest data from the API, which saves me a lot of time and effort. And more importantly, I feel like I leveled up my Python skills. So, if you’re thinking about doing something similar, go for it! Just be prepared for some frustration along the way.
