Birdus Alexa Skill

See improved version at https://github.com/1i/ebirdus

Read a list of bird sightings, sort into counties by day and list the species seen for that day.

• Defaults to all sightings yesterday sorted by counties.
• Allow users to say a county Kerry and return only the sightings in Kerry.
• Allow users to say a day Monday sightings and return the sightings for that specific day.
• Allow users to say a day Monday and a location Kerry sightings and return only the sightings in Kerry that specfic day.

Lambda collects results -> saves to S3 & DynamoDb -> Alexa reads results.
Relies on https://github.com/1i/dynamoBirdus to prepopulate the sightings, which reads from www.irishbirding.com .

Update the lambda

maven clean install
aws lambda update-function-code --function-name birdus-alexa --zip-file fileb://./alexa-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar

Pom

AWS dependencies are available on the class path.
Maven shade plugin is used to include extra dependencies in the jar for Lambda with the setting for createDependencyReducedPom to false.

Learnings

• Check which language is the app targeting UK or US english. Top left of the code section in Alexa console.
• App can be cloned into same language but different region.
• Implement the required Intents and the SessionEndHandler which is not documented well as a requirement.
• When app returns sound but no logs when calling via simulator or real device, try renaming the invocation name.
• Innovation name has to be 2 words to be published but can be one word for development.
• SL4J logging mess. Uber Jar and other versions of L4J on classpath.

Improvements

• If the requested day is not available fall back to most recent result.. How to along iterating back in days..
• eBird.org provide a RESTful API

Testing

Unit tests though I am happy calling S3 inside a unit test instead of reading a local json file.
Integration tests calling S3.

End to End test this is where I would like to assert against the Alexa output see alexaResponse.json.
The problem with E2E tests :

• Where are they run from, locally, CI or in AWS.
• How to authenicate to call the lambda.
• How to call lamdba directly or do I need APIGateway infront.