Baby Birth Announcements on Serverless
A good friend educated me on how he set up a web application to inform the parents minute-by-minute re: the arrival of his baby. 👶
I thought that was a brilliant idea!
This way, new parents can push updates, and avoid the thundering of “has the baby arrived yet?” questions. 💡
So, I set about trying to build one, with the following criteria:
- I don't want to spend time and money maintaining any infrastructure. 💰
- I would like to be able to limit the site's visibility to folks I share it with. ㊙️
- I don't need updates to be “real-time”; Some delay or latency is fine. 📠
- The updates should also be in Chinese and Japanese. 🤖
- Building it should be fun! 🎮
“Why don't you just post it on Twitter/X?”
I also wanted to avoid social media for such announcements, if possible.
How did it go?
I ended up with a user experience where:
- Folks visit the site hosted on https://write.as with password protection.
- I can post updates via email + image attachments.
In terms of the “tech stack”, this is pretty low-code.
I've set it up via:
- Orchestrating all logic within a Pipedream workflow
- Using an email trigger to capture email body and attached images
- Leveraging Deepl's API to translate EN content to ZH and JA
- Uploading images via the Snap.As API
- Publishing via the WriteAs API
- Putting the business logic within a 106-line Python function
You can use Deepl to translate for free (within limits).
I also am using a free account on Pipedream, so I'm really thankful for such services.
I spent 2 weekends experimenting before tying this up.
However, I really enjoyed building this simple workflow.
