Discord Team Builder

Inspiration

Our inspiration for Discord Team Builder came from an issue that we noticed in online hackathons, the group forming stage. Currently the system revolves around individuals messaging the chat and looking for group members - a difficult task, and an extremely daunting one for newcomers. To tackle this problem, our group decided to create a Discord Bot using Rust to help make this process as seamless as possible so that all future hackers, beginners and veterans alike, can easily form groups in future hackathons.

What it does

Discord Team Builder is a bot designed to help facilitate group forming during the beginning phase of a hackathon. The bot would effectively manage the total number of participants, the total number of groups both with and without vacancies, and the individuals who are actively seeking groups.

How we built it

The Discord Team Builder bot was built using Rust alongside the Discord API and the Serenity library.

Challenges we ran into

We faced several challenges throughout the entire process. The biggest and by far the most difficult challenge was familiarizing ourselves with a new programming language. This made troubleshooting our errors more difficult than what we are accustomed to. Another major challenge we faced is coordinating times where we were all online to work together as our group had members in South Korea, Germany, and Canada. These set backs provided a critical learning moment in our experience and brought our attention to details which we had not considered that impact a project, and ultimately gave our group the opportunity to persevere and overcome this challenge.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

An aspect of our development process that we are particularly proud of, was our ability to merge our diverse academic and professional backgrounds together. By taking into consideration our wide range of perspectives, as our group has members from South Korea, Germany, and Canada, we were able to bring unique suggestions to augment our idea to the table. It allowed us to learn from each other while also learning about each other’s cultures and how Covid-19 is shaping life in different areas in the world.

What we learned

The learning points varied person to person as we had some first time coders to some with academic or personal project based experience. In general, it allowed us to understand Discords API and the process going into developing a bot while also familiarizing ourselves with Rust.

What's next for Discord Team Builder

Currently, the bot has some bugs when it is used for multiple servers (such as checking in in one server makes you check in on all of the other servers). In the future, we would like to fix these bugs. Also, we would like to introduce feature that merges two groups to one.