Can you automate love?

Friend, what's the laziest thing you've ever done?

The internet's best answer is this legendary officer who ordered a ship to change course to get the morning sun out of his eyes.

But we're engineers, our lazy looks like this 👇

You get tired of a task, start to automate, continue to automate, keep going, and wait what was the task again ...

After 24 years of coding I've got lots of those stories 😅

Like when I replaced a $6000/year editor with a $2/year gaggle of JavaScript. Great use of serverless.

Or when I was broke and built a bot that emailed me from the future. "hey Swiz, if you keep going like this you'll be broke

That was fun. Designed my own machine learning financial projection algorithm and everything!

The Google interviewer said: "Don't mention interest in machine learning on your resume if you have no experience". 😂

Rude.

Or that time I used AWS Lambda and Twilio to answer the door. Callbox calls a Twilio phone number, Twilio pings a Lambda, Lambda sends you a text, answer the text, door opens.

No more phone calls from packages!

Then I realized you can add the gate code to your address and delivery people let themselves in. Even easier 😂

But it was fun to build.

Been meaning to automate feeding treats to Kiwi 🦜 and got stuck on "Oh right, I don't know robotics ...". Wouldn't that be cool though? Build a robot arm that listens to audio cues and feeds your bird treats so he goes back to his cage instead of destroying the cabinets.

But I digress.

Here is the coolest most laziest almost-finished automation I've ever attempted 👇

Automating love with serverless

For Valentine's Day this year, I got a Lovebox for The Girl. A cute little IoT device that spins a 3D printed heart and shows photos from an app.

She loved it.

And she loved it even more when I said "I'm gonna build a bot to make sure you get a new photo of our relationship every day"

Lovebox has no API and I spent the first 3 hours of this project reverse engineering their GraphQL API. Learned a lot!

Like did you know encrypted https traffic is easily snooped on when you have physical access to the client? 🤯

Finding this GraphQL mutation was the hard part:

mutation sendPixNote(
  $base64: String
  $recipient: String
  $date: Date
  $options: JSON
  $contentType: [String]
) {
  sendPixNote(
    base64: $base64
    recipient: $recipient
    date: $date
    options: $options
    contentType: $contentType
  ) {
    _id
    type
    recipient
    url
    date
    status {
      label
      __typename
    }
    base64
    __typename
  }
}

The rest was easy:

1. Install graphql-request, a smol graphql client
2. Init with a snooped JWT token
3. await client.request(mutation)
4. sls invoke -f sendNote

And a Serverless AWS Lambda wakes up on your machine as if it was running in production. 30 seconds later, the Lovebox spins 😍

Next step: S3 bucket with a pool of photos and a daily trigger.

What do you think, will this work? hit reply

Cheers,
~Swizec

PS: I'm doing a live serverless Q&A on Monday, you should join :)

PPS: look what arrived in the mail! more on this next week