Student project - alert action when X happens Y amt of times, how?

[unknown00]

Disclaimer - I am not a professional dev/engineer
Use case = check if X happens Y amt of times, do something/alert
For the sake of this post, let's saying X = user tweet a certain #X can really be anything, so let's not focus on TWTR API/limits/security. For example, X can be when CNN posts certain keyword article or user posts a new tiktok, it doesn't matter in this post.
My guess for requirements is...HW - need some box running 24/7, like an AWS ec2 boxDB - I assume you need a DB to store checks (the Y amt of times)
My pseudo code is

def checker():
	# check if user tweets
def addtodb():
	# store the check so we can count, basically a ++
def checkdb():
	# query db to check when count is 3
def endaction():
	# alert me
if (checker() == true):
	addtodb()
if (checkdb == 3):
	endaction()

Am I going about this correctly? Some initial questions that come to mind is how to I endlessly run a check? I don't think it makes sense to run this code (.py file) every 1 second in an infinite loop via cron. Maybe can leverage streaming/kafka? Any particular examples, libraries, of packages you would recommend?

[bowlofred]

Yes, if your "checker" is hitting an external API you don't want to do that constantly. Often you don't need to be up-to-the-second, so polling at an interval (say 20 minutes) is sufficient but doesn't overload external servers.

Think about if this should happen in an interval. Do you want to know if this happens 3 times ever? Or maybe 3 times in a calendar day, or 3 times in a 24 hour period? So you'll have to have a counter and some method to reset the counter.

The checker depends on the specific API. Nice would be to keep track of the last time you checked. Then ask the API for any events since that time. That cuts down the data that gets transmitted. Otherwise you might have to parse a lot of data and see if any of it is in the relevant time frame.

[namarang]

APIs have rate limits. You can just sleep at whatever rate relative to it