eBirdus / Birdie Sightings

Retrieve notable bird sightings from ebird.org APIs for the island of Ireland

• 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 specific day.

Birdie Sightings Alexa app

Depending on where your Alexa device is registered to.
Mine is registered to Amazon.com but with UK English language.
Amazon.com Birdie Sightings app
Amazon.co.uk Birdie Sightings app

How to Build and Deploy

From parent directory. Build the jar via maven.
mvn clean install
Update existing the Lambda with the new jar.
aws lambda update-function-code --function-name ebirdus --zip fileb://./target/ebirdus-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
Invoke the Lambda remotely.
aws lambda invoke --function-name ebirdus --log-type Tail outfile
The LogResult is returned in Base64 so will need to be decoded.

Ebird.org API

Excellent bird learning resource provided by Cornell University USA.

Notable birds

curl "https://api.ebird.org/v2/data/obs/IE/recent/notable?back=1" -H "X-eBirdApiToken: d4adr470eh9u"  

Ebird.org postman docs
Postman collection in test resources.

Lessons Learnt

• Adding a more specific request phrase, "open birdie sightings for {Dublin}" does not trigger the correct intent, so I added "for county {Dublin}" or "for {Dublin} city"
• 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, description of the apps can be different between regions.
• Implementing the required Intents & the SessionEndHandler which is not documented well as a requirement until the Amazon certification failed the app.
• When app returns sound but no logs when calling via the simulator or real device, try redeploying the lambda, renaming the invocation name.
• Innovation name has to be 2 words to be published but can be one word for development.
• SL4J logging was a mess. Needed an 'Uber Jar' and other versions of L4J in AWS Lambda 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

I'm happy to blur the lines between unit and integration tests as this is a small project.

• Unit tests
• Integration tests - calling Ebird API.

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. - Running locally with the credential file.
• How to authenticate to call the lambda. Using local aws token in file loaded via Default strategy.
• How to call Lambda directly or do I need APIGateway in front. - did not need ApiGateway can call directly.