1.
Sai Shenoy
Priyanka Godbole
August 02, 2014

2.
Life is short.

3.
API Challenge
API Alchemist

4.
Architecture
MongoLab
bucketlist-cache.best_fares (for
all pairs)
bucketlist-cache.weather
Worker
box
AIR API
sabre_dev_studio-flight gem
Wunderground, kayak, SITA1,
hotwire (did not integrate)Newsstand like
push service

5.
Some interesting technical problems…
• Feed of best places to visit, not necessarily curated
based on airports nearby.
• Scrape kayak’s hidden api to get nearest airport.

6.
Problems cont’d
• But not all airport pairs have fare data.
• Out of 98 initial airports
– Only 18 pairs had data with SFO as origin

7.
Problems / Solutions cont’d
• get all the country iso codes (ruby gem)
• then get all countries that air api has (sabre api)
• then get all cities for country
• then get all airports for the cities

8.
I don’t know what to write here, cont’d
• For airports not in the list, find the nearest airport in the
list and show the fare
• This is where the “awesome” SITA1 api came into play.
Pass in IATA codes and voila you have distances.
• Some kind of graph algorithm here could have
optimized this.
• Brute force (it’s a hackathon) took ~ 2 hours in
background while ios dev happened

9.
Get fares, make shiny app, peace out
• Once you have serviceable airports
– Then get fares (sabre)
• Also get weather info (wunderground)
• Write to mongolab collections
• iOS app queries mongolab (mongolab api)

10.
Future work