For the Twilio Hackathon, I'm doing an automated WhatsApp account to which you can ask information about the closest asteroid to Earth at a particular date.
Today's Work
Today was the hardest day of work so far. Not because anything was particularly challenging in itself, but because all I did was very unfamiliar terrain for me. I deployed the asteroid app on Heroku, I configured the end point to properly interpret and respond to Twilio's request and set that as the end point for incoming messages on Twilio.
I'm not going to bore you with the details of all that. Big thanks to @avalander for helping me deploy the app on Heroku, though. It is nice that now I just need to push changes to the repository and they get automatically deployed.
The API's endpoint wasn't all that hard to configure, but I had to read through a lot of documentation to get there. It also didn't help that I was parsing a JSON instead of stringifying it and that caused it to throw an error.
I didn't get to tidying up the code. But oh well, that'll be another day's trouble.
Next Steps
Now I finally have a bare bones app. It is extremely simple, but it is completely functional. Next on my list is:
- Tidy up the code a bit (this time for real).
- Create a fallback URL for error handling.
- Allow for some level of customisation when sending a request for asteroid data.
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