jonkani / my-rep Goto Github PK

Since there's a number of ways to say a legislator's name, the current plan is to have a custom slot containing congressional name variations. The issue comes with how this is mapped to the legislator's bioguide ID, which is how one searches for a specific congress member in the ProPublica API.

Currently, I'm working with two possibilities:

1. Make a big hashmap with the name variations. This has the benefit of not requiring extra services for the skill, but it would require patching the skill itself when a congress member enters or leaves congress. Loading a giant object for the skill also might not be particularly performant.
2. Make a DynamoDB table containing the names. This does require integrating DynamoDB to the skill, but handling big datasets is exactly what databases is for. It also means congressional updates could be handled by just updating the database and interaction model, instead of the core skill.