Ever wonder how many cups of coffee it took to develop, test, and produce Athena? Probably not, and we wouldn’t blame you if you haven’t. But we were curious. And in between tasks getting Athena ready for you we decided to take a quick programming detour and design a real time coffee counter. And who knows, maybe cups of coffee will become the next great metric measuring program complexity (full disclosure, we hope it doesn’t, because our coffee cup counter was done in pure jest).
Our real time coffee cup counter is built off of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The same service that is the backbone of Athena. IoT is a technology that allows different “things” to communicate securely, quickly, and cheaply. It further allows things to communicate with our cloud compute network, opening up even more possibilities for functionality.
So how does our real time coffee cup counter work? Each time we make a cup of coffee we press an “IoT button,” which is our “thing” in our system. The IoT Button then sends a wireless signal to one of our cloud services, called a Lambda function, to “increment the coffee counter.” Lambda is a compute service AWS provides that is serverless, always on, and really cheap.
This lambda function reads the current number of cups of coffee consumed, adds one to the count, then stores it back. The value of the number of cups of coffee is stored in yet another AWS service called Parameter Store. Parameter Store allows us to store small data values in the cloud. All of this is done in mere milliseconds.
In order to read the number of coffee cup counters, we have a REST API that may be consumed by a caller. A REST API is a well known internet technology that allows different compute services to learn information from other internet computers. Most mobile app and web based applications are built using REST API services. We just designed one to read from the parameter store, then return the number of coffee cups consumed.
To be good programmers, we of course had to document the REST API. For those interested, the SWAGGER definition of our coffee cup REST API, along with the rest of our public APIs, is at https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis-docs/Shooters-Technology/api/
For the rest of you, who just want to know how many cups of coffee we consumed while building Athena, visit our website at rezults.scopos.tech. The left hand navigation menu will display the coffee counter for you.
So keep an eye on the counter. And every time you see it increment, know we are working hard to make Athena a better product for you.
