Friend, what's the laziest thing you've ever done?
The internet's best answer is this legendary officer who ordered a ship to change course to get the morning sun out of his eyes.
But we're engineers, our lazy looks like this 👇
You get tired of a task, start to automate, continue to automate, keep going, and wait what was the task again ...
After 24 years of coding I've got lots of those stories 😅
Like when I replaced a $6000/year editor with a $2/year gaggle of JavaScript. Great use of serverless.
Or when I was broke and built a bot that emailed me from the future. "hey Swiz, if you keep going like this you'll be broke
That was fun. Designed my own machine learning financial projection algorithm and everything!
The Google interviewer said: "Don't mention interest in machine learning on your resume if you have no experience". 😂
Rude.
Serverless Handbook
Learn everything you need to dive into modern backend. Understand any backend
these chapters gave me knowledge which is sufficient to build real products and the hand-drawn diagrams and high-leveled descriptions gave me the feeling that i don't have any critical "knowledge gaps"
Launching soon, be the first to know.
Or that time I used AWS Lambda and Twilio to answer the door. Callbox calls a Twilio phone number, Twilio pings a Lambda, Lambda sends you a text, answer the text, door opens.
No more phone calls from packages!
Then I realized you can add the gate code to your address and delivery people let themselves in. Even easier 😂
But it was fun to build.
Been meaning to automate feeding treats to Kiwi 🦜 and got stuck on "Oh right, I don't know robotics ...". Wouldn't that be cool though? Build a robot arm that listens to audio cues and feeds your bird treats so he goes back to his cage instead of destroying the cabinets.
But I digress.
Here is the coolest most laziest almost-finished automation I've ever attempted 👇
Automating love with serverless
For Valentine's Day this year, I got a Lovebox for The Girl. A cute little IoT device that spins a 3D printed heart and shows photos from an app.
She loved it.
And she loved it even more when I said "I'm gonna build a bot to make sure you get a new photo of our relationship every day"
Lovebox has no API and I spent the first 3 hours of this project reverse engineering their GraphQL API. Learned a lot!
Like did you know encrypted https traffic is easily snooped on when you have physical access to the client? 🤯
Finding this GraphQL mutation was the hard part:
mutation sendPixNote($base64: String$recipient: String$date: Date$options: JSON$contentType: [String]) {sendPixNote(base64: $base64recipient: $recipientdate: $dateoptions: $optionscontentType: $contentType) {_idtyperecipienturldatestatus {label__typename}base64__typename}}
The rest was easy:
- Install
graphql-request
, a smol graphql client - Init with a snooped JWT token
await client.request(mutation)
- sls invoke -f sendNote
And a Serverless AWS Lambda wakes up on your machine as if it was running in production. 30 seconds later, the Lovebox spins 😍
Next step: S3 bucket with a pool of photos and a daily trigger.
What do you think, will this work? hit reply
Cheers,
~Swizec
PS: I'm doing a live serverless Q&A on Monday, you should join :)
PPS: look what arrived in the mail! more on this next week
Well well well if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions pic.twitter.com/J4qeWGCJyd
— Swizec Teller published ServerlessHandbook.dev (@Swizec) March 16, 2021
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The perfect resource that shows you how to jump into modern backend and understand any backend. A why and how book.
Serverless Handbook
Learn everything you need to dive into modern backend. Understand any backend
these chapters gave me knowledge which is sufficient to build real products and the hand-drawn diagrams and high-leveled descriptions gave me the feeling that i don't have any critical "knowledge gaps"
Launching soon, be the first to know.
Have a burning question that you think I can answer? I don't have all of the answers, but I have some! Hit me up on twitter or book a 30min ama for in-depth help.
Ready to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization
Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, modern backend for the frontend engineer.
Ready to learn how it all fits together and build a modern webapp from scratch? Learn how to launch a webapp and make your first 💰 on the side with ServerlessReact.Dev
Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com
By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️