em-shea / vocab

A serverless Chinese vocabulary building app. Sends daily vocab words at your HSK level with custom, on-demand vocab quizzes and links to example sentences.

Hi, I'm Emily.

I like serverless, Python, and Chinese language.

Check out my blog, emshea.com, or find me on Twitter, @em__shea.

A few of my favorite personal projects:

• 🐼 Haohaotiantian, daily Chinese vocab emails - homepage, repo
• 🧙 Magic: The Gathering card finder - homepage, repo
• 🐱 Neko Atsume: Cat Collector API - homepage, repo

I currently lead Application Integration Go-To-Market at AWS. These are my personal projects here.

vocab's Issues

receiving words without confirming my email (can't unsubscribe)

Hi Emily,

I was exploring your application code and functionality so I subscribed to a list. I never confirmed my email address and yet I'm receiving daily words.

Also the "Unsubscribe" functionality is not working and is returning a 502, most probably because my user was not found in the DB.

Test out Twilio/SendGrid

See if there is more ability to customize confirmation emails through Twilio/SendGrid

Use CW logs for triggering error notifications

Move email contact list lists to S3

PostTweet and SendDailyEmail Functions are Not Idempotent

The PostTweet and SendDailyEmail functions are asynchronously invoked by EventBridge with the TodaysWordsSetEventRule rule. Currently, these functions first query DynamoDB to make sure no sending activity has been logged, and then log the sending in the database and proceed to actually send the email or tweet. However, if the function runtime crashes (or encounters some error) after updating the table but before sending the email or tweet, the functions will not pass the idempotency check upon retry, and the program ends without sending the remaining emails or tweets. The triggering error may include software, hardware, or network errors that would cause the asynchronously invoked function to retry.

Issue:
The PostTweet and SendDailyEmail functions could not ensure idempotency when runtime crashes occur after updating the idempotency table but before sending the email or tweet. This results in incomplete sending of emails or tweets when the functions are retried.

Suggested fix:
To make the PostTweet function idempotent, we can send the tweet first and then call update_idempotency_table(). Since Twitter prohibits duplicate tweets within a short period of time, duplicate sending should not occur.
For the SendDailyEmail function, we should send all emails before updating the idempotency table. This approach at least ensures that all subscribers receive at least one email even if the function runtime crashes and restarts.

Find a better website for HSK level 1-3

Baidu translate example sentences are very useful for advanced learners but has too many unfamiliar words to be helpful for beginners.

Pinyin normalization

Take existing CSV with pinyin in the format "an4 li4" and convert to ”ànlì”

Combine word and URL into a single text

Add user interface to sub/unsub

Create webpage for users to subscribe and unsubscribe from messaging.

• Show previews of example words at each level
• Show the last word that was published for each level
• Accept level and phone number, create new or delete SNS sub
• Welcome text to verify successful sub

Optional:

• Mini placement test
• Links to other resources

Add level-specific texts

Add SNS topics for each level.
Add filtering by level on the CSV reader in VocabRandomEntry.

Ex:

[
 {
   hsk_level: "1",
   topic_arn: os.environ['hsk1_arn'],
 },
 {
   hsk_level: "2",
   topic_arn: xxxx,
 },
 {
   hsk_level: "3",
   topic_arn: xxxx,
 }
]

for entry in ^^^:
 1. call random selector to pull word of the day (pass the filter)
 2. send word to SNS (entry['topic_arn'])

Add email subscription option