Rendezvous

Have you ever had trouble deciding where to go during your summer vacation? Then Rendezvous is the perfect solution for you. Simply pass it a command, and the bot will give you a variety of options.

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Inspiration

Summer is the primary inspiration behind Rendezvous (RDV). Many times after a grueling semester of hard work, it is easy to make a lot of plans only to fall back into your comfort zone and not follow through on your plans.

What it does

The goal of the RDV Bot is to encourage users to go outside and promote discussion with friends about events. Using the '/rdv' command, users are given a list of events recommended by RDV based on the parameters that are specified by the user. The user can then decide for themselves which event interests them most.

How we built it

The RDV Bot was programmed using the python language, the pycord library, hosted using Google Cloud, and used the Discord and Ticketmaster API's. RDV itself was simply given administrative permissions so that it was not restricted during the process.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges that the RDV Bot ran during testing and debugging was latency issues. This was a major issue since there were quite a few number of commands that we wanted to test, and it the process was too time consuming. Furthermore, Discord by default takes an hour for a bot to update a slash command. Outside of the Bot itself, another issue was that the Ticketmaster API that was used did not support a Python SDK, which prevented the bot from directly using the API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we are most proud of the is the process of creating RDV. Everyone of us in the group enjoyed contributing whatever we could to the bot. Initially, we had several brain storm sessions sketching up ideas for the project and all the features we wanted. It was a good idea that we drew up a lot of features, because many ideas got cut later down the road due to the constraints that were presented by the design or technology we were using. Most importantly, we are proud of the product we created because it was made with the intent to promote healthy habits and promote social activities so individuals can be more proactive and go out more. As a result, we would like to think we were contributing towards a positive cause and something.

What we learned

We learned a lot, most notably from the challenges we faced which honed our technical skills with python. We combatted latency in the bot by using cache to save API results. As a result, only relevant API calls were saved, and reduced the number of total API calls made. We also used a Guild ID to limit RDV to a singular server. What this did is allow us to not wait an entire hour for RDV to be updated with a command. For the API not being supported by a python SDK, we used a HTTP client to get around that. Besides the technical aspects, we all improved our soft skills. Since this was an online event, it was extremely important to maintain communication. As a result, a lot of time was spent in voice chat even during programming so all of us could openly discuss with each other while creating the bot and even before the creation of the project as well.

What's next for Rendezvous

There is still a lot more that can be done to improve the RDV bot. For instance, we want to create a user specific bot that can keep track of a user's favorite events, and recommend events based on the user's preference. There were also cut features and commands. Most importantly, a price feature would be extremely functional for most users to be able to find events based on their budget. After that is done, we would like to make a working version of a bot that is public and available on any server.

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