Witty Kitty Committee

Inspiration

Pandemic log day 478: With each passing day of the pandemic, it’s sometimes hard to feel not constantly bombarded by social media and news. You’re laying on your bed, eyes glazing over Instagram models, inflammatory Fox News headlines, and worst of all, MRO McGill Communications. You just can’t help but feel worked up all the time; the internet is designed to keep you upset. Wouldn’t it be better if you could just take a break?

Introducing: putting the phone down. We’re just kidding; we have a website we need you to use. Keep that tablet in your lap and allow us to present the Witty Kitty Committee! Why watch your crypto stakes plummet when you can look at randomly-sourced images of cats? Your ex-girlfriend might have left you on opened but these (k)itties are here for you 24/7 (and also sometimes dogs show up and we don't know how to fix it.) There’s no such thing as free serotonin: only our website. Use it.

What it does

Open the webpage and hit the button. Angels and API’s collide: there’s a kitten. Hit the button again. Another cat appears; this one is gray. Hit the button again. More cats. You can’t stop. There’s nothing more endearing than a cute kitty.

How we built it

We used JavaScript, HTML and CSS to write the code necessary to create our web-page. We had the chance to use the Unsplash API to generate our random pictures. To avoid repetitions, we created a for loop that iterates through all the possible queries we assigned.

Challenges we ran into

We spent Friday night and the daylight hours of Saturday trying to use Twilio to send cat images to people via SMS. Despite being the greatest engineering students to ever grace this McGill, we fell short of the skills needed to integrate Twilio into our scaffold.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Figuring out how to generate a random cat each time was more difficult than anticipated. Our work-around was to append random relevant adjectives to each query(e.g. “Cute,” “cuddly,” “funny,” etc.)

What we learned

We learned a lot about using SQLite and Twilio unfortunately, we did not have the time to implement our learnings and be satisfied with our result.

What's next for Witty Kitty Committee

We built this app as a warm, fuzzy distraction from reality. As such, it would be in our interest if this app really grabbed people’s attention. If given more time we would research, integrate, and implement Twilio into the Witty Kitty Committee. We want to implement a program that randomly sends cute cat pictures by text to our users at random moments in a day.