Building phone number validation system with AWS Pinpoint

At $0.006 per call (at the time of writing), it does not cost much. There may be other free tools out there, but I am skeptical about how shady they turn out to be, caching my valuable database; Plus, if I am already using other AWS components for various needs, it is a really quick integration to verify phone numbers with something as simple as a CLI call, with AWS credentials/profile already setup —

Output looks like this-

This is good enough for randomly checking phone numbers. But I have a mammoth CSV of few Gigabytes to process. A quick and dirty solution in RoR since I already have a rails project running -

Add required AWS SDK in Gemfile

Drop this method wherever it fits appropriately, probably in under /lib under a class-

This is simply pretty-printing the responses to screen, not much useful. Lets create another CSV file with only those rows which satisfy a certain condition, say only mobile numbers. Modify the above file to write a row to new CSV conditionally.

Next, I open that CSV to write and loop through conditionally

Now I actually have a CSV file with only rows that contain mobile numbers! And yes, I have a flag in my log. ⛳️

What if I had multiple rows having same number? What if it was a user/people database where multiple people shared same number? What if AWS threw error? (It does sometimes if you send a bad number)

Cache it. Catch it.

For this, I separate out the AWS query part and validating part to new functions.

The original method should now look like this to make use of above-

These, I leave it as exercise to the reader!

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