LionBot

A Facebook Messenger bot meant to make life at Columbia easier

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Inspiration

We had a lot of questions at Columbia. Getting answers was a lot harder. So we decided to fix that by making a bot for the Columbia community. We're still working on the name for it, but we plan to release it in the coming weeks to the entire Columbia community pending choosing a name for it. We also plan to make the code open-source so any Columbia members can contribute to the project.

What it does

LionBot (name still being decided) helps make life at Columbia easier. It can tell you what's available in both Columbia and Barnard's dining hall, tell you the news, send you breaking news updates, and even help you find someone selling and/or buying

How we built it

We spent most of the night building out our backend and setting up the database. Once we got the database set up, we started working to integrate new features and set up our buy/sell section of the bot.

Challenges we ran into

People are not nice and will send queries meant to confuse and break your bot. This happened a lot. As a result, we had to sanitize user inputs heavily and ensure that our bot was flexible enough to work on limited user data and to return appropriate errors instead of just crashing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We figured out Flask and learned how to build and maintain databases. We also worked as a team and made a bot!

What we learned

We learned about why it's important to comment your code and keep organized. We also learned to constantly test your code because a lot of bugs like to lurk.

What's next for LionBot

We'll be releasing a public beta at m.me/thecolumbialion in the next few weeks. If you want to help beta test early, email team@columbialion.com. Once we've cleaned up our code and written a more detailed README, we'll be releasing the code publicly.

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