Santa Suite

The coolest holiday bot ever!

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✨Inspiration✨

Our inspiration while building Santa Suite was the spirit of the holiday season. We built a hack that helps users understand the history and culture of the holiday season in a fun, intuitive way, within Discord.

⚙️What it does⚙️

  • Our hack is a Discord bot that will provide fun activities and a trivia-quiz themed on the winter/holiday season for users to play within discord or text messages.
  • As a bonus, the bot also has a functionality to place Santa Hats on the user’s profile pictures with the help of a slash command and another slash command to generate a holiday card from you, which you can share with your friends across discord!
  • The bot also has a beautiful landing page that helps users understand what it does and provides an easy way to get the bot on your server.
  • The bot also has a twilio client that enables the trivia questions to be accessed by text message. We built this keeping in mind that older folk (and those under 13) in our family may not have discord.

🏗How we built it🏗

We built Santa Suite with JavaScript, DiscordJS, Autocode and Canvas. The landing page was built with Google Cloud and Tailwind. We did full justice to various sponsor tools (Google Cloud, Linode, Twilio, CockroachDB) that Major League Hacking provided us with this weekend. Here’s how we used them:

🔴 Twilio 🔴

  • We used twilio to provide our older users who aren’t good with discord an alternative, they can access the trivia over text messages.
  • In order to do this, we used Twilio’s Autopilot console (A conversational AI platform that makes building awesome chat bots like ours possible).
  • Twilio and MLH also gave us free credits with which we could buy a phone number for the Twilio Client

🟡 Google Cloud 🟡

We learned how robust & fast Google Cloud services are and seeing that Firebase had a free plan that was great for us student hackers, using Google Cloud was kind of a no-brainer.

  • We used Firebase Hosting and Firestore, a Google Cloud service to host our landing page.
  • We tried using Cockroach DB for the first time, with our cluster being served on the Google Cloud.

🟢 Linode Cloud 🟢

We utilized Linode for its hosting and storage, for our discord bot. Linode is one of the top IaaS providers and is incredibly easy to use and the free Linode credit from MLH for us to learn and build on Linode was the cherry on the cake! Linode also has great documentation that really helped us implement Santa Suite’s backend. Linode is fast, flexible, and reliable, and we truly enjoyed using it. I’d say Linode took our bot to the next level!.

  • our Linode Base URL: 45.79.199.42

⚫️ CockroachDB ⚫️

  • We used Cockroach DB and set up a cluster.
  • We stored all our trivia questions in the CockroachDB database.
  • We found amazing resources on CockroachDB through the cockroach academy, and learnt how to use it.

🔵 GoDaddy Registry 🔵

  • We claimed the following domains from GoDaddy Registry with credits provided by Major League Hacking: http://merrychristm.us/

🚧 Challenges we ran into 🚧

  • Autocode gave us runtime errors that we weren’t able to figure out
  • Our bot was buggy.
  • Time constraints.
  • Hackers located in different timezones, collaborating over a huge time difference.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏆

  • All of us were new to developing discord bots and we are proud that we managed to build one this weekend successfully!
  • This was also our first time using Twilio and CockroachDB and we are glad that we could learn about it and incorporate it in our hack successfully.

📚What we learned 📚

  • Discord Bot Development
  • Using Twilio
  • Using CockroachDB
  • Using Linode
  • Using Google Cloud, Firebase and Firestore
  • Finally, teamwork and collaboration!

🚀What's next for Santa Suite🚀

  • We will add more questions to our trivia feature
  • We would also incorporate user feedback.

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