Can I Code Against an API to Learn a Product?

BSidesLV 2014

Presented by: Adrienne Merrick-Tagore
Date: Tuesday August 05, 2014
Time: 16:20 - 16:50
Location: Proving Ground

“Can I learn how to use the product my company sells by interfacing with its API?”

That was the question I asked myself when I started at OpenDNS in the marketing department. Having learned and used Python in business school, I decided to create an application that would monitor my organization’s DNS queries and email me a daily list of all new domains.

This talk walks you through my journey of re-familiarizing myself with Python, interoperating with a new product’s API, and massaging the results into a daily alert. The end goal: to create something useful to reference for future development, to learn about the API, and to impress my colleagues - many of whom have no idea that I’m doing this in the first place.

In my talk, I will provide examples of my logic, coding decisions, and any other stumbling blocks I ran into along the way in the hopes that attendees will take the plunge and hack away at something cool to further their knowledge.

Adrienne Merrick-Tagore

Adrienne Merrick-Tagore is a unicorn - but by day, she works as Product Marketing Manager at OpenDNS. Prior to joining OpenDNS, she worked in Marketing at WhiteHat Security. Before WhiteHat, she worked in several roles in the Financial Services industry, including Product Management and User Experience Design. Her current focus is simplifying communications between groups, both internally and externally. Having experience in the security and finance industries, Adrienne is familiar with the fast-paced, risk-management mindset and uses that background to craft compelling stories, bringing data analytics to life in the enterprise B2B and B2C worlds. Unlike most people in product marketing, Adrienne also has technical chops with knowledge of web application security and the Python scripting language.


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