GitPress

gitpress

Inspiration

For anyone whose major part of the work includes checking notifications and responding to them as quickly as possible, the daunting task it to search through a huge list to find something that's useful and requires urgent action.

We have smart assistants which make life easier for us by reading our emails and other notifications. Our inspiration was to explore the same idea with an approach towards the benefit of developers community. So, we created a skill for filtering notifications and generating a crisp summary for the most important ones.

The idea originated during the preparation of Google Summer of Code and internship period. Many times, we missed the review requests, issues assignments, etc. because we simply couldn't manage the notifications. For any active member in the community or an individual within a busy enterprise suffers from this. Thus came GitPress: Crisp summaries for your GitHub notificaitons.

What it does

It allows to see your filtered GitHub notifications as well as to search awesome lists in the Github. You can:

Search Awesome list
Check notifications summary
See if you have any mentions in comments.
Check you different updates on issues like assigned to you or your issues has been closed or reopened.
Check PR Updates, see if your PR has been merged or closed.
See if any one has asked for your review in the pull requests.

How we built it

This app consumes GitHub API for the notifications data once you authorise it to access your account using OAuth2. The applications is built on NodeJS and uses Alexa kit and Octokit REST.js as major libraries.

Challenges we ran into

GitHub notification API doesn't provide with enough content to come to direct conclusion as to what the notification is about.
We had to dig through issues APIs, events APIs and issue events APIs to make a map of what happened in a particular notification.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

After a long haul of coding trying to make sense of data through various API endpoints of GitHub, we were finally able to connect them in we wanted and present the user with a useful summary.

What we learned

This was the first experience developing for Alexa and we enjoyed learning developing skills for Alexa and solving everyday issues with the help of it.

What's next for GitPress

There are some features like tracking the activity on your commits, references of pull requests and including major details of a notification when asked by user. We are also looking to build the app so it shows notifications directly on echo show.