We are happy that Open Humans will have four Outreachy interns this summer. Our interns are working on their own Open Humans related projects and will regularly blog about their internship experience. Read Manaswini’s post about working with the Github API for a new Open Humans project:

I have been working with Github API all this while. I had come across some really cool visualizations with Github API but hadn’t had the chance to work on it. Thanks to the project ‘Adding data sources’ that I was motivated to add Github as a data source and guess what, I discovered that it will work in principle! The online development tool Github enables developers to contribute and discover open source projects, thus realizing their aspirations.

Github provides REST API access to get variety of the data of your projects from Github, be it repositories, issues or pull requests and lots more! I chose Github API since the documentation is meticulous and easy to comprehend for anyone who is looking forward to getting started. Also this provides an excellent source for creating data explorations.

The outputs generated are available in various formats including JSON and other compatible formats depending upon the data to be extracted. One can view public data without authentication but in case one wants to store private data, then authentication is a must. Both single and two-factor authentications are supported. Two-factor authentications, as the name suggests, is more secure as this doesn’t include sharing your passwords as in basic authentication.

This internship period has been truly rewarding. I came across some really cool stuffs such as rate limiting and requests respectful during this period which I was unaware of until now. Diving deeper, I also came across the types of rate limiting.i.e. user rate limiting, geographic rate limiting and server rate limiting. All thanks to my mentor, Mike Escalante for giving me invaluable insight regarding the above terms and supervising me in each and every step.

The Github API provides rate limits of 5000 requests per hour. Till now, I have been editing the demo template and resolving issues simultaneously. I was experimenting with the output JSON and investigating various ways in which the output JSON will look better.

Cheers!