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Final email!
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Brief information about HacKalendar from our slide.
Inspiration
As new hackers (and even now after a little bit of experience), we are always on the lookout for the most popular Hackathons taking place. Participating in larger Hackathons provides the opportunity to attend great workshops, talk to more company recruiters, meet more hackers and have a bigger platform to showcase ideas. We wanted to develop something that would help hackers find the most happening Hackathons especially during these unprecedented times when it is hard for information to be passed on through peers and friends.
What it does
Our hack utilizes UiPath. On a request, the automation finds the most popular Hackathons (through the number of participants) and compiles a short list with some key information. This list is then emailed to recipients so that they can always be up to date on the latest and greatest Hackathons! We see use cases for Universities to encourage participation in Hackathons, and perhaps even for Devpost’s members.
How we built it
We built this program completely with UiPath. It was a technology that we had not tried before and were extremely curious to explore. In all honesty, we will probably be using it again in the future as it’s simplicity and versatility really surprised us!
As for the setup, we made a Google Cloud Project that would allow us to use the Gmail API provided by the Google Cloud Platform. We then integrated this with our UiPath project by providing it with the Client ID and Secret.
The first task we had was to collect data from all the Hackathons taking place in the future/going on. In order to do this, we used the “Data Scraping” tool in UiPath Studio and extracted all the data including name, url, participants, and time until submission for each Hackathon. We then formatted this data into an excel spreadsheet by sorting it in a descending order based on the participants column.
Next we build a for loop that would extract the first five rows of the data in order to put in a table format. Once it was in this format, we used the “Send Email” activity/tool in order to send an email message with the table and some text. We made sure to write the body of the email using HTML in order to have the table in an accurate format.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest challenges we ran into was collecting data from each Hackathon’s URL individually. We were not able to accomplish this due to our inexperience with UiPath Studio. However, we soon realized that all the data we needed was already being displayed in the main Hackathons list page on Devpost. Therefore, we simply went with this idea and gathered data from here.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are glad to have completed a fully functional tool that can be used! It was great to add RPA and UiPath Studio to our skillsets so that we can continue to work on other automation projects.
What we learned
The major thing we learnt was the concept of RPA (Robot Process Automation). This tool proved to be quite efficient in the manner in which it is able to automate numerous tasks that organizations/companies may need manual work for. Using UiPath Studio’s drag-and-drop functionality really makes the user interface very smooth and easy to work with. All in all, we are glad we spent time learning something that will be of use in future projects!
What's next for HacKalendar
We plan to develop our RPA even more by allowing Hackathon events to directly be added to Google Calendar along with the email feature. Additionally, we would love to explore a way to integrate our project with mobile applications.
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