Inspiration
I wanted an Alexa skill that would read out the full text of the weather alerts (in some way mimicking the functionality of NOAA weather alert radio)
What it does
The skill by itself is fairly simple and just reads out the alerts for the user's location based on their zipcode. The independent back-end lambda function regularly pulls the CAPS alert information from alerts.weather.gov (once every two minutes) and stores it in dynamoDB. Each active skill session then pulls the alert information from dynamoDB.
How I built it
I programmed the skill using javascript through the nodeJS ASK-SDK and run it using lambda. The back-end function is also running on lambda and uses the nodeJS AWS-SDK
Challenges I ran into
The CAP alerts produced by alerts.weather.gov can expire before their scheduled expiration date (being removed early), can either be replaced by alerts with similar text (but different IDs), or can be updated (while retaining the same ID). I had to constantly tweak the back-end lambda function as I learned about these.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Consistently paring down the number of reads and writes to dynamoDB for efficiency
What I learned
The instant you think you're done programming is the instant you think of something more efficient or have some .unexpected error pop up
What's next for Just Weather Alerts
In the future I plan on editing the skill to allow it to provide notifications to the user about weather alerts, as opposed to waiting for the user to use the skill.
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