User authentication at Google can be a bit confusing, especially the difference between the Refresh Token and the Access Token. When building an oAuth2 integration developers run into three common problems: The Refresh Token is mysteriously only returned sometimes. The Access Token expires randomly. The Access Token is not being…

Over the past few years the StarThinker open source project has been a tremendous pleasure to work on with stakeholders both internal and external. In the incredible 5 years the project has evolved with Google, gTech, and Google Cloud. On the other hand, as Google Cloud continues to mature, the…

My daughter wanted to try coding this week, specifically she wanted to build a game. As an engineer, I was thrilled at the power she was about to discover. As a father, I was horrified by the number of hours my eight year old might spend in front of a…

Last week I listened to The Happiness Advantage By Shawn Achor. First, I’m really proud, I upped my listening speed to 1 3/4 and managed to retain most of Shawn’s great principles. Second, I think the book changed my life, or at least came into it at the right time. …

Sometimes a Google API and the associated Discovery Document is early release or somehow otherwise restricted to specific Google Cloud Projects. To use the API the caller must somehow inform the API endpoint of the originating Google Cloud Project. This is done through the API Key. First this only works…

CM360 allows only one account per report. When running the same report for multiple accounts the user or script has to create the report multiple times and then download and combine those reports into one. …

There are hundreds of values that can be edited for LineItems and Insertion Orders in DV360. SDF files do a great job but are difficult to automate due to manual uploads and can be accidentally corrupted. To improve upon SDF limitations, our gTech team collaborated with partner engineers to create…

A request came into our team asking for help comparing different campaigns in the the same dashboard. The team needed to compare time, geography, and performance metrics faster than the three week process it normally took to source, refine, and present the data. …

To speed up working with the Campaign Manager API and specifically the reports endpoint, we’ve created a command line tool to help with the following: List existing reports — verify one exists. st_cm --account [id] --list -u [user credentials path] Get the report definition — verify it has the correct…