/small-talk

An app to generate small talk for those who hate small talk

Primary LanguageTypeScriptMIT LicenseMIT

small-talk

An app to generate small talk for those who hate small talk. Helpful for those who are socially awkward, or just want to avoid it. Could also be helpful to workers who need to communicate with coworkers who are geographically located in different areas.

Channels

  1. Weather - OpenWeather
  2. News - Hackernews (most news APIs aren't good or cost $)

Other channel ideas are welcome! Feel free to submit an issue with your idea.

Tech stack

  • Node.js
  • TypeScript
  • AWS
    • API Gateway
    • Step Functions
    • Lambda
    • IAM
    • Cognito (Coming Soon™️)
    • Secrets Manager
    • CDK
  • Caching service - likely Momento (Coming Soon™️)
  • Frontend - TBD (Likely React or Flutter web)

Architecture

Step Function Workflow Diagram

small-talk-asl

Release plan

  • v1.0.0 - CLI app that generates small talk based on a location that a user inputs
  • v2.0.0 - Web app that generates small talk based on a location that a user inputs
  • v3.0.0 - Add optional authentication to web app to allow users to save their favorite locations

How to run (v1.0.0)

Prerequisites

  1. Install Node.js
  2. Ensure you have an AWS account, install the AWS CLI, and configure your credentials

Deployment

  1. Get an API key from OpenWeather
  2. Create a Secret in Secrets Manager titled smalltalk-weather with a plaintext secret value that is your OpenWeather API key -> Save the secret ARN (will need this for step 4)
  3. Clone the repo
  4. Copy .env.example to .env and fill in the values
  5. Run npm install
  6. Run export AWS_PROFILE=<your_aws_profile>
    • Optional if you have a default profile or use --profile instead
  7. Run npm run deploy

Using

  1. Get the api URL
  • Base URL comes from the console output after deploy SmallTalkStack.SmallTalkStackapiEndpoint
  • Add /small-talk to the end
  1. Get the api key
  • The api-id should be from the console output after deploy SmallTalkStack.CLIApiKeyId
  • aws apigateway get-api-key --api-key your-api-id --include-value
  1. Run a curl command
  • curl --location 'your-url' \ --header 'x-api-key: your-api-key' \ --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \ --data '{ "location": "Portland, Oregon, US" } '

  1. Alt: use Postman or Insomnia

  2. Note: Units of measurement returned are imperial (e.g. Fahrenheit, miles, etc.). Location should be in format {city name},{state code},{country code}. See OpenWeather docs for more info.

Cleanup

If you want to delete the resources created by this project, run npm run destroy.

Tests

TODO #5

npm run test.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more info on our guidelines.