Ron Swanson Quotes

This is a fun side-project that I undertook back in 2017. That was when I started experimenting with new technologies outside of college courses. Coincidentally, Amazon released a competition that awarded Alexa skill submissions with a brand new Amazon Echo. I thought it was the perfect opportunity to work on a new technology and also earn something in return. I decided to build a program, also known as an Alexa Skill, that spits random quotes from Ron Swanson, a beloved character in the hit TV show Parks and Rec. It was a relatively trivial skill to build, but the result matters more than the difficulty to me. It ended up getting more than 15,000 unique customers in a matter of months, which was a pleasant surprise to me. That translates to around 80,000 API requests a month. Luckily, I used AWS Lambda in the backend, so I didn’t have to worry about any sudden infrastructure scaling issues.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. During summer 2019, the Alexa skill was removed from the Amazon store because it returned an inappropriate quote (oops, gotta check those edge cases). I hope to fix it and release the skill back into the wild soon, but not right now. At least I got a free Amazon Echo out of it so I’m happy.