Quantified Self: Week three progress and real time beer events using Untappd

Untappd beer data turned out to be very easy to add to my quantified self dashboard. Registerring an app on their api page gives you a client ID and key useable for 100 REST calls an hour without any kind of OAuth trickery (all untapped data is pretty wide open). I programmed two rest services. The first a recurisve decent through untappd’s /v4/user/checkins/ api and the second using the min_id parameter of the same api to check for recent checkins after the last checkin_id stored in elasticsearch (which is retrievable with sorted, size=1 call using an elasticsearch _search api from nodejs).

I learned while on a trip to the west coast that fitbit’s APIs give data back in a timezone-less fashion, probably to keep information around daily achievement badges intelligible. This makes life problematic when my tracker and server are in different time zones and caused problems until I returned to the east coast. I think I’m going to have to add support for data source directed _ids so that i can update old time sections when I know the data source is updated irregularly by apps that work so asynchronously like Fitbit’s phone app. My daily steps are still a few off even when I’m on the east coast, so there’s a bug in there somewhere. It would may be interesting to use the subtraction feature in Timelion to find the data discrepancy.