I have many weaknesses in the software development space, beyond (or perhaps due to) the fact that I only dabble in it. Reading new code, in a language with which I’m not yet entirely comfortable, with limited documentation, definitely tests my patience.
Squirrel!
I have a need to track Twitter posts; specifically, I want to both look for interesting posts (probably via the Twitter streaming API) and keep a record of my tweets and those tweets that I retweet.
I have done the latter in Ruby by building on Brett Terpstra’s Slogger tool, but I’d like to handle this in Erlang.
There are relevant libraries on github, but all suffer from various flaws; I hope that by understanding and leveraging them I may learn some useful skills, and perhaps I’ll be able to offer patches or documentation to the libraries.
Of course, the Twitter API ain’t what it used to be in developers’ minds, so I’m definitely hopping pretty late on this bandwagon.
erlang-oauth is the most complete, production-ready library, so I’ll start there. Also, it appears to be the OAuth library for erlang_twitter.
The limited documentation doesn’t address Twitter, especially how to use the access token that Twitter supplies if you only wish to use a client against your own account.
If I can figure out how to handle Twitter’s other OAuth mechanisms, that would be nice as well, but that’s less important to my current project.
Finally, this is an opportunity to understand how rebar works, but that’s also low on the priority list.