Daily Dose of Discord

example of one of our bot's messages

Inspiration

As the name suggests, we were inspired by Daily Dose of Internet, which provides small clips of interesting internet culture. We realized that the unique nature of each clip made watching always feel varied and refreshing. As such, we decided to apply this approach to the theme of "empowering learning." If we can get people to learn at least one thing new everyday-- stimulate the brain to learn-- I think it would be worth it.

What it does

Everyday, at a user-chosen time of day, the Daily Dose of Discord will send a message to a user-chosen channel. This message will contain a random hobby in the form of a wikiHow article.

How we built it

We used Discord.py to build the Discord user interface, and aiohttp for non-blocking asynchronous web requests to scrape wikiHow for random articles.

Challenges we ran into

Finding a way to store and keep track of asynchronous timers that had to be able to be cancelled at any time was incredibly time-consuming, as was dealing with anything involving asynchronous programming (it's hard to wrap your head around after being used to synchronous programming for so long). For many of us, this was the first time using Git/Github, so we had a hard time collaborating using it. Of course, there were also many other small issues that constantly plagued us throughout our development cycle.