digestsforthought is a small program that uses the Twitter API to select a random tweet from the last 50 tweets for a few accounts, and then mails a digest using SparkPost’s Transmissions API.
I started the project back in 2017 to scratch multiple itches. I wanted a way to keep up with some specific Twitter accounts. But I also wanted to learn:
- Python
- AWS Lambda
- AWS CloudFormation
- Twitter API
I had done a little Python before, but I had not used the other technologies. It was a fun project, and I learnt a lot playing with these technologies. I’ve used CloudFormation a fair amount at work since, and Lambda a little bit.
It’s worth noting that the CloudFormation templates (at the time of writing) have not been updated to use the AWS Serverless templates. They pre-date AWS’s new CFN constructions that make building serverless templates much easier! I also did not use the serverless framework because I wanted to understand Lambda and CFN from the ground up. I’ve used it since.
I’ve got digestsforthought set up to mail me daily at 06:00 UTC. I still read the digests regularly, and have discovered various useful articles as a result.