Texting myself the weather every day
Opening the Weather app every morning is too much effort, but you know what isn’t? Writing a recurring job to query an API every morning and send you the results in an SMS, delivered right to your doorstep phone! Come with me as we embark on my short, little journey through this very process.
Version 1: A Zapier “Zap”
Version 1 of this service was simply just a “zap” on Zapier. Very easy to connect together a trigger and an action, and start receiving a text message summary every morning at “around 7am”.
Pretty good already!
I really like the summary that Zapier generates, as it has a bit more detail that you might get from a single WMO Weather Code.
However I still wanted to actually code this myself, for a couple of reasons:
In this very simple version, there’s no way to customise what time the message arrives; It’s locked at an “around 7am” window. My girlfriend also started using this Zap and her first question to me was whether it could arrive before 7am because she’s often leaving for work earlier than that. This is something I should be able to code and host myself, without relying on a third-party. Maybe just a matter of principle but I felt like, “if I can do this myself, I should.”
Version 2: TypeScript + Twilio + GitHub Actions
This was really the sort of thing I wanted to do from the start. Complicated-ish, but with a clear progression and enough moving parts to keep me interested for an afternoon.
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