An app for myself: Facebook EventSync

Off late I have become pretty involved in a local (Philadelphia) user group called RefreshPhilly. The group meets the first Monday of every month and hosts a couple of talks by some local new-media professionals, designers or developers. The event is hosted at the new Comcast building where I work.
However like a lot of big corporate buildings, the Comcast building only allows registered guests into the building. This meant that all attendees had to be registered with building security to allow them to enter. Since our attendee list often reaches 100 odd people, I needed to get the names to security in chunks, so that I didnt have to get all of them at the last second. Unfortunately the Facebook events page only shows the total number of people who have confirmed their attendence. What I really needed was “How many new people have confirmed since the last time I looked”. So I whipped this little app that uses the Facebook API to take snapshots of the attendee lists from any Facebook event (using a valid event id) at any time and show the number of new people who have confirmed attending or maybe attending status by comparing the snapshot to the previous snapshot saved on a local file.

I am almost sure this app will only ever have one user (me) but hey, if you ever need it, you can download it from here. Feel free to comment if you would like to see any additional functionality here, or if you have an idea for this being a more practical app 🙂

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur