Bracket Bot

Inspiration

This is our first hackathon, so none of us knew what to make at the beginning. We all liked the suggestion of a discord bot, and Sebastian had used the gspread API before, so we tried to think of ways to combine the two ideas. With these two ideas in mind, Eric remembered some online tournaments he played in recently, and knew a lot of them used google sheets to track tournament brackets, as well as how much of a pain it can be sometimes. So we decided to make a discord bot that would easily allow people to make and update tournaments.

What it does

Bracket Bot’s signature feature is the ability to create and display a tournament bracket for the members of a discord server. This bracket is updated in real-time on a google sheets document which the bot links to. The sheet is automatically formatted such that anyone can save it as a PDF as any time to have a visualization of the tournament in the form of a document.

How we built it

We used python to create our bot with the help of Discord and Google Sheets APIs. We also hosted our bot on Heroku.

Challenges we ran into

Debugging/testing our code was a major difficulty as we had to figure out how our several complex and interconnected components worked together to result in errors. Besides, we spent so much time trying to learn new libraries and implement them in our work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we were able to bring our idea to completion despite this being our very first hackathon. We are also proud because we learned APIs that were partially or completely unfamiliar to us and managed to use them effectively.

What we learned

The key lessons we learned are how to collaborate on a project with others, manage our time, learn documentation for different APIs and host programs on a database.

What's next for Bracket Bot

The major feature we plan on including in the future is generating a new sheet each time a user wants to create a tournament, ensuring that multiple tournaments can occur simultaneously.