InstagramMessageBot

Inspiration

Silicon Valley S6:E1, that'll tell all.

What it does

This bot talks to your friends when you don't really like it. Just give it your login credentials, tell it who to talk to, and let it run in the background while you do whatever.

How we built it

We built this using Python, which we chose primarily for its general ease of use. We also utilized open APIs such as the one from OpenAI and a reverse-engineered InstagramAPI called Instagrapi

Challenges we ran into

God so so many, like even in the submission I ran into one and ran out of time so it doesn't work. The main issue we were trying to solve in the early stages was a versioning issue. The latest version of Instagrapi is a little broken, but if you roll back one of its dependencies it fixes it. Weird issue, but it's fixed now. Another issue we had was right before submission, and I genuinely have zero clue what went wrong because it's doing the same thing as the test code, so uhh, yeah.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our group was full of new members, with me (Jason) being the most experienced. With this in mind, I'm proud we were able to develop an almost working bot in the given time frame considering I haven't touched Python in years, and have never made a bot before. We also are proud of overcoming issues we had along the way, such as the aforementioned versioning issue (which had me pulling my hair out)

What we learned

We had to remake our API Keys so many times, so for one removing those before we pushed the code to GitHub. We also learned how to work as a team, discussing and compromising on what we wanted for our project. We also learned how to work with APIs, which we all found to be challenging if the documentation is incomplete.

What's next for InstagramMessageBot

Eventually, I want to get it to work properly, and once I know it works, I want to port it over to Rust so that it's a bit faster than it is currently because the test code for it was ungodly slow.