The Google Prediction API offers the power of Google’s machine learning algorithms over a RESTful API interface. The machine learning algorithms themselves are a complete black box. As a user you upload the training data and, once it has been analyzed, start classifying new observations based on the analysis of the training data. I recently spent some time investigating how to use the API to determine the sentiment of a tweet. This article collects my thoughts on the experience and a few recommendations for future work. ...

At VendAsta we have a few APIs that are backed by search documents built using the App Engine Search API. These APIs are queried using a search string entered in a text box. One way to improve the user experience of this text box is to offer the user suggestions of popular searches to use as their query. This article describes how to achieve this. ...

Asynchronous functions can provide a boon to application performance by allowing time consuming functions to operate in parallel and without blocking the main execution thread. This article explains how to use the Tasklet API to compose and execute asynchronous functions in Google App Engine. ...

I’ve spent the past eight months working from home thanks to some great support from my employer, allowing me to support my wife and children and still contribute as a meaningful employee. Working from home with four small children and a loving and supportive wife has brought its fair share of both challenges and delights. This post will describe the working from home experience and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. ...

I have been working on the problem of recording changes to an ndb model. One way to accomplish this is to stream data changes to a BigQuery table corresponding to the ndb model. It would be great to do this in a generic way which gives us the problem of generating a BigQuery table given an ndb model. This article will describe one solution to this problem. ...

An unfortunate DevOps task for any team running App Engine is restoring data from backups. One way to do this is by accessing the Google Cloud Storage URL for a given App Engine backup and importing that backup into BigQuery. This article will show you to get the Cloud Storage URL for an App Engine backup and manually perform that import. ...

When doing a MapReduce operation there are times when you want to edit a set of entities without triggering the post or pre put hooks associated with those entities. On such ocassions using the raw datastore entity allows you to process the data without unwanted side effects. This article will show how to use the RawDatastoreInputReader to process datastore entities. ...

The Cloud Endpoints API comes packaged with endpointscfg.py to generate client libraries in JavaScript, Objective-C (for iOS) and Java (for Android). You can also generate a few additional client libraries using the Google APIs client generator. This article will show you how to use the generator to create a C# client library. ...

Cloud Endpoints provides strong integration with OAuth 2.0. If you can use this integration – do it. However, some legacy systems require supporting alternative authentication mechanisms. This article will show you how to secure an API endpoint using Basic Authentication. You can use this as a starting point for whatever authentication method you choose. ...

Writing unit tests for App Engine Cloud Endpoints is a fairly straight forward process. Unfortunately it is not well documented and a few gotchas exist. This article provides a template you can use to unit test Cloud Endpoints including full source code for a working example. ...