This is the tale of two nerds going to Japan. One nerd was going through life drama, and had cancelled a trip to San Francisco with a former friend. The other nerd was a bit older, but so excited about it that the down nerd couldn't say no. Because for him, this trip was a dream come true. Years before I thought it would be possible. And when we were leaving, we both immediately said we'd be back again.
Above, you can see the website I created for me and my friend to keep track of the places we wanted to go. And the places we went to while we were there. Basically, it's the same basic idea as the Moving Website I still use to this day. Except it's got substantially more information and functionality.
Using the Python, Lambda, HTML and Google Maps knowledge I got from updating the moving website, the Japan 2019 site took it to a new level. With color coded icons to represent visitation priority and visited status, my friend added everything to a Google Sheets document, and then Python running in AWS Lambda handled the rest. Chronologically, this was actually done back in October and November of last year, while the Work Automation script was created in May / June of 2020. I point that out, because the Japan and Moving websites were truly firsts for me.
To the left, you can see a snippet of the full 104 lines of code needed. It pulls the data from Google Docs, imports it into the Python Script running in AWS Lambda, and parses it. It then uploads that data to Amazon S3, and invalidates Cloudfront, before finally sending a notification that it finished running via Amazon SNS.
Much like with the Work automation script, this was done by breaking it down into much smaller and doable single action script that were later combined into the full all in one script.
Below you can see a few of the posts (There are upwards of 30 total) I made about the trip on Instagram. To say I loved going would be the understatement of the decade. I love the bullet train, really like Anime, and dream of living somewhere with public transit as good as it was in Tokyo.