Purpose

Since college, I have maintained a list of words whose meanings I did not intimately know upon first encounter. For years I have looked up the definition of each word and added the word and its definition to text document which I would review from time to time. This certainly is another symptom of my undiagnosed OCD, and maintaining and reviewing this list has always been a chore. I’ve long imagined a technical solution: One in which I can text the each new word to a webapp, which will do the job of looking up the definition of the word and inscribing the word and definition into “the list.” Thus Vortaro (Esperanto for “dictionary”) was born.

Technical Details

This toy project allowed me to refresh my understanding of developing and deploying a cloud-based webapp. It also gave me the opportunity to play around with Twilio and its webhook API. The project is written in Python on top of Django and is deployed via AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Source code is available on GitHub.