DEV Community: Eileen

Text Yourself the NASA Picture of the Day with Standard Library and Node.js

Eileen — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 07:00:56 +0000

Me: The sky is not the limit ☁️
Stranger: Pics or I don't believe you 🙄

Based on the above conversation, I'm going to show you how to get NASA's highly coveted Astronomy Picture of the Day (APoD) with Standard Library 🌑 ⭐️

If you're not familiar with Standard Library, we're a serverless platform that enables everyone (yes, everyone! Calling all PMs, designers, marketing teams, sales people, oh and engineers… 🙋) to build, ship, and integrate scalable APIs in a matter of seconds. With the help of our online text editor, Code.xyz, you can do all of this right from your browser.

Requirements

Standard Library account (free)
NASA API key (free)

Standard Library provides a plethora of API templates that are readily usable. In order to retrieve the APoD API template, go to Code.xyz and search for astronomy-picture-of-the-day by @eileenzhong 💁

Name your API:

One last step before sending the APoD to your phone!

You'll need to properly configure the env.json file. You'll notice that there are two sets of variables; however, we will be deploying our code to the dev environment, so we will only need to provide the dev variables.
First, insert your Standard Library library token (STDLIB_LIBRARY_TOKEN):

Then, insert your NASA API key. When finished, your env.json file should look like this:

That's all the setup you have to do!

To run the program, click "Debug" to bring the parameter input area into view. Enter your phone number, including the country code:

When you click "Run", you'll receive NASA's astronomy picture of the day! 🚀

That's not even the coolest part.

We don't want to click "Run" every single day to get this text delivered to our phone. Thankfully, Standard Library has a task scheduler where you can customize a schedule to automagically invoke your newly created API.
In Code.xyz, click the "Tasks" tab. You can then enter a phone number and customize a schedule to your liking:

Suggestion: schedule the task to execute once a day since APoD is an acronym for astronomy picture of the day, and hence, the picture won't change throughout the day.

When you're happy with the settings, click the blue "Schedule Task" button to schedule your API.
That's it! If you know one ☝️, two ✌️, or five 🖐 other people who would appreciate a daily astronomy picture, you can schedule a different task (one for each phone number) for all of them.

Bonus section

If you've made it this far, you deserve a reward 🌈 Now, don't get too excited (actually - do get excited 🙃). With just 2 more lines of code, you can send your friend a random quote along with the APoD!

We'll be using WordPress's API to pull a randomized quote: http://quotesondesign.com/wp-json/posts?filter[orderby]=rand&filter[posts_per_page]=1.

Don't worry about all the RegEx (regular expressions) sitting on line 12. The WordPress API just returns some HTML tags that won't play nicely in an MMS 📱

Alternatively, you can just replace the value of the quote variable with any chunk of text you'd like to send your friend: const quote = "Hi friend."

Questions, comments, ideas? Feel free to email me at eileen@stdlib.com! I'd love to hear about your next project with Standard Library and Code.xyz.

Eileen is a software engineer at Standard Library.

Build a Reddit Moderator Bot With Standard Library + Code.xyz in 10 Minutes

Eileen — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 07:04:33 +0000

If you're a subreddit moderator, chances are you've received requests from community members to delete an inappropriate comment or ban an ill-mannered user. But it's 2018 going on 2019 - we're in the midst of the biggest tech era and spoiled with things like AI, automation and bots. We no longer need to perform menial tasks like monitoring subreddits. Instead, I'll teach you in 3 easy steps how to build a Reddit bot that will automatically check a subreddit for flagged comments.

Whether you have no programming knowledge or 15 years of professional experience, you'll be able to deploy this bot with Standard Library in under 10 minutes.

If you're not familiar with Standard Library, we're a serverless platform that enables everyone (yes, everyone! Calling all PMs, designers, marketing teams, sales people, oh and engineers… 🙋) to build, ship, and integrate scalable APIs in a matter of seconds. With the help of our online editor, Code.xyz, you can do all of this right from your browser.

Requirements

Reddit moderator account (for the subreddit you'd like to monitor)
Standard Library account (free)

Step 1: Get Reddit bot template

Estimated time: 30 seconds
Head over to Code.xyz in your browser and select reddit-moderator-bot by @eileenzhong (that's me! 🤓👋) in the Community API Sources tab:

Name your API:

Once done, you'll conveniently land in Code.xyz (Standard Library's in-browser text editor) with the Reddit bot project code.

Step 2: Copy and paste

Estimated time: 2-5 minutes
This next step involves expert knowledge of the copy-and-paste skill to set some required environment variables. You'll notice there are three sets of variables listed in your env.json file: local, dev, and release. We'll be deploying our code to the dev environment, so we only need to worry about the dev variables for this tutorial!

All fields are found in env.json:

To retrieve your STDLIB_LIBRARY_TOKEN, right click between the quotation marks and select "Insert Library Token…":

Keys prefaced with REDDIT_-* can be found on Reddit (REDDIT_USERNAME and REDDIT_PASSWORD are your moderator account's username and password, respectively).
If you don't already have a Reddit app, register for one here with your moderator account:

Copy the REDDIT_CLIENT_ID and REDDIT_SECRET_KEY:

Paste both into env.json:

When your env.json file is properly filled out like the above screenshot, the bot is ready for some preliminary testing.
Fill out the required parameters (definitions and screenshots below):

**Parameter definitions**

subreddit: the name of the subreddit you are moderating
threshold: what score do you want the comment to have in order to perform the requested action? 
allowBanPermission: true (allow ban requests) / false (ignore ban requests)

Then click the "Run" button, which will do 2 things: execute and deploy the program.

Congratulations, you've deployed an API to Standard Library! 😎 🎉 🎊

Step 3: Set it and forget it

Estimated time: 1 minute

The final step is to put your bot to work. You can do this in Code.xyz by scheduling a task, which will automatically execute the API you just created according to the schedule you choose.

Suggestion: depending on subreddit traffic, you might increase or decrease the frequency of bot invocation. A good start is to have the bot do a scan once every 5 minutes.

Once you click the "Schedule Task" button in the bottom right corner, your Reddit bot will scan r/{subreddit} to reply to any new !ban/!delete requests and perform these tasks on any comments that meet the score threshold according to the schedule you have chosen.

That's it! 🌟 Now imagine… if it was this quick and painless to deploy a Reddit moderator bot, what else can Standard Library do for you? Feel free to reach out with any ideas or questions: eileen@stdlib.com.

Eileen is a software engineer at Standard Library.