The Kick Wire

A fully serverless sneaker newsletter built with AWS — auto-scrapes new releases weekly and emails to subscribers with zero manual effort.

🤔 Why I built it

I built The Kick Wire to apply my AWS skills in a real-world context and showcase my ability to design a fully serverless system. Inspired by my interests in sneakers, automation, and cloud computing, I created a newsletter platform that runs entirely on AWS with zero manual intervention. This project highlights my hands-on experience with services like S3, CloudFront, API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, EventBridge, and SES.

🛠️ Tech Stack

• AWS: Lambda, DynamoDB, SES, S3, API Gateway, EventBridge, CloudFront, CloudWatch Logs
• Python 3.13, Boto3, BeautifulSoup4, Requests
• Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript — implemented via prompt engineering with AI tools

🗺️ Architecture Overview

The Kick Wire is composed of two main flows:

1. User Subscription Flow

When a user visits thekickwire.com, they can submit their email to subscribe to the newsletter. This flow is entirely serverless and powered by AWS.

Flow Steps:

1. CloudFront serves and caches the static website hosted on S3.
2. The user submits their email through a form, which calls a REST API via API Gateway.
3. The API triggers a Lambda function that:
   • Stores the email in DynamoDB
   • Sends a welcome email via Amazon SES
   • Automated Newsletter Flow – Weekly scraping and sending of the newsletter

2. Automated Newsletter Flow

Every Monday at 10am, an automated process scrapes sneaker release data and emails all subscribers the latest drop info.

Flow Steps:

1. EventBridge triggers a scheduled Lambda function every Monday at 10am.
2. The Lambda function:
   • Scrapes sneaker release data from NiceKicks
   • Pulls subscriber emails from DynamoDB
   • Sends the formatted newsletter using Amazon SES

📰 Newsletter

The newsletter is structured with HTML and styled using inline CSS, including release dates, sneaker images, and links — all automatically generated.

🌱 Future Improvements

• Add Amazon SQS to handle API traffic spikes asynchronously
• Apply unsubscribe functionality
• Improve HTML formatting in newsletter and in website

🧠 What I learned

This project taught me how to build resilient serverless systems using AWS. I also learned about API Gateway CORS configs, advanced DNS management, and how to debug Lambda logs with CloudWatch. More importantly, it showed me how fun it is to turn a personal interest into an automated cloud app.

✉️ Contact

Made by Edgardo Reyes
Email: ebrevan@outlook.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ebrevan