I thought that for the Twilio Hackathon it might be fun to do something that integrates a couple of APIs. I also thought it might be interesting to use their new WhatsApp API. I am always happy to dig through all the goodies in NASA Open APIs. So this time, I thought I'd make a WhatsApp automated number that answers questions related to the closest celestial body to earth.
I'm not entirely sure how exactly I'll make it work. It'd be nice if it answered more than just the closest asteroid right now. If you could, for instance, ask for the closest this week, yesterday, on the day of your wedding, etc. I'll have to see if I can make the bot understand that sort of request written in natural language.
Originally, I had intended to do it with Elixir, as I have been itching to do a proper project in it for a while now. But I think it's more than I can bite at the moment, as I have never written a server in Elixir and I already have enough to familiarise with for this project. So I suppose I'll use NodeJS.
Anyway, this is my declaration of intentions. I hope I can finish it and ends up being something relatively cool.
Top comments (3)
This is a great idea! If you're going to use NodeJS, you could try something new by using TypeScript in place of JavaScript if you aren't already. Best of luck!
Thanks for the suggestion. I am actually thinking about using Sanctuary for typing, as it also provides functional types, which I find make the code easier to reason about and deal with.
That is a nice syntax! Reminds me of my experiments with Elm, which gives you a application framework in addition functional language features