What it does
Andy is your personal shopper -- automate away filling out all the tedious checkout fields like shipping address, billing info, and shirt size that you have to fill out every time you want to purchase something.
How we built it
Andy's built on Twilio's SMS API and a Django REST backend that runs Selenium for automation and form filling and connects to a MongoDB database. We have also built a Chrome Extension for shopping on your browser.
Challenges we ran into
A big challenge we encountered was the anti-bot detection that a lot of shopping sites have employed. We spent a lot of time thinking about how to work with this restriction and in the end found a technical solution to emulating human behavior with randomness in waiting and scrolling.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of the way we learned how to build with new technologies like Twilio, Selenium, and Chrome Extensions. We are also proud of how we handled the number of setbacks we faced throughout the weekend. We only discovered the anti-bot detection after we finished most of the development and started testing thoroughly, and were weighing the decision to pivot into a new hack with just over 12 hours left until submission due, but handled it well and solved our way through the problem.
What we learned
Start small and test, test, test! We wish we could've discovered or better predicted what we'd run into with anti-bot detection, but it was all of our first experience with automation and Selenium so we're proud of learning so much about a new technology.
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