This is an experiment in creating a medium-independent interview logic for the second version of JustFix.nyc's tenant app.

For example, the interview logic in lib/tenant-interview.ts is used to power both the SMS and web versions of this prototype's experience:

Motivation

This experiment uses a combination of strong typing and functional programming paradigms to separate the interview logic from any specific communication medium--SMS, Web, et cetera--and ensure a reliable user experience that can be easily tested and iterated upon.

That said, it might also be a terrible idea. We'll see.

Quick start

You will need NodeJS 8.x or later.

npm install
npm run watch

Now you can run either the console, web, or SMS version of the interview.

Console front-end

To use the console version of the interview, open a separate terminal and run:

node console/bundle.js

You can also pass --help for more information.

Web front-end

The npm run watch command also launches a web server, so to visit the web front-end, open your browser to http://localhost:8080.

SMS front-end

To simulate using the SMS version of the interview, run:

node sms/bundle.js simulate <SMS message text>

SMS webhook server

Note: using the SMS webhook server requires installing package.json's optional dependencies.

To use the SMS version of the interview from your phone, open a separate terminal and run:

npm run sms

This will start a server on port 8081. You will want to point Twilio's incoming message webhook to the /sms path on this server, probably via a proxy like ngrok. This will also require buying a phone number on Twilio.

Once you've got everything hooked up, send a SMS with the text "hi" to your Twilio number.

For more details on configuring the server or using the simulator, run:

node sms/bundle.js --help

SMS Lambda function

Note: using the SMS Lambda function requires installing package.json's optional dependencies.

A bundle is also created that can be copy-pasted into AWS Lambda's code editor. This allows you to process SMS messages with Twilio, but without needing to provision a server.

For more details on how to configure and deploy the Lambda function, see sms/lambda.ts.

Development

Aside from Node JS, this project uses TypeScript, so you may want to familiarize yourself with that before changing the source code. It's strongly recommended that you install any TypeScript integration available for your editor of choice.

Deployment

The web version of the prototype can be deployed to the repository's gh-pages branch by running:

npm run deploy

Visual Studio Code support

This project supports JSON Schema integration with VS Code. To enable it, run:

npm run schema

You'll need to re-run this whenever you update relevant parts of the codebase, as the JSON Schema is generated from the TypeScript type definitions.