#55 ShackSlack, HackerGuide (HG-Bot), Hoya Hacks 2022

I bet you have struggled in deciding on what project to do in this hackathon. But fear not, we present HG-Bot, a slack bot to solve this issue along with all the hardships while developing any project

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Inspiration

Collegiate hackathons are events where students come together to solve problems; they're so popular that you can find at least one happening every weekend. Thanks to the pandemic, many hackathons transitioned to an online format, and so many of those hackathons happen on Slack.

For any Hackathon, the most important and crucial part is to decide on an idea. In the initial stages of HoyaHacks, we struggled on deciding on what topic or idea should we work on. Each and every member of our team had tons of ideas and the discord group chat was getting chaotic. Additionally, new members who joined later have issues with keeping up as they had to read the whole chat history.

Thus, we decided to build a Slack Slack bot which can manage and maintain our ideas, so we can streamline and smoothen the whole process right from idea selection to deciding the features and actually implementing the project.

Also, this will be very helpful in the corporate world where the teams are working on huge projects. Group members from different time zones can easily find a compilation of ideas/features later and easily refer it.

It's true that one can use other applications such as Notion or keep, but the issue with these applications is that after a certain time, the information stacked gets humongous and thus a new member of the team will not be able to digest that much information quickly. Also, for small hackathon projects, collaborating on multiple fronts is chaotic as members will chat on slack and then refer notion or other applications for notes.

| HG-Bot will solve all these issue and make our lives much easier. |

What it does

Hacker Guide aka HG-Bot is a Slack Slack Bot which will help you brain-strom ideas for Hackathons and organise then to implement it. HG-Bot can store project ideas which can be summarized and displayed whenever a member wants to glance through it or edited in the future if required.

HG-Bot is designed to be used majorly in early on the development lifecycle but also in later stages. By using HG_Bot in the early stages of your project, you get the following benefits:

  • Summarization of the project ideas
  • A simple and clear way to brainstorm ideas
  • Brilliant yet simple way to organize thoughts of each and every team member
  • Painless deployment and configuration of bot
  • Scale-up your ideas transparently and logically to suit your training and deployment needs
  • Everyone gets a fair chance to voice their thoughts

How we built it

  • Once we were done with the ideating phase we designed the database schema and architecture of the system.
  • First, we configured our Slack bot.
  • Then we wrote our server-side code i.e. flask app and made sure the server is up and running.
  • Next, we connected our server to our slack bot and tried sending simple commands.
  • Finally, we integrated our server to firebase and tested the whole system.

Challenges we ran into

  • As this was our first time working with slack. we faced numerous challenges while configuring the slack bot. But it was nothing coffee and a sleepless night cannot solve.
  • Next challenge was an issue with ngrok. For some reason, even after trying for 4-5 hours, reading tons of documentation, and watching various youtube videos, we were unsuccessful in resolving the issue. Then a weird idea popped up and we decided to change the port from 5000 to 3000. Once we did that, everything worked smoothly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • This idea will help 100's and 1000's of teams in managing their projects.
  • How easily we can summarize the whole brainstorming session and get the crux of the session

What we learned

  • Learned a lot about how to develop a slack bot
  • How to integrate firebase with slack bot
  • How easy it is to add new features once basic bot configuration is done

What's next for HackerGuide (HG-Bot)

We are planning to continue working on this project and scale it up to the deployment level. Here are the list of our next steps:

  • File is by the edges and deploy it
  • Add new features such as:
    • Voting ideas
    • Sharing ideas between multiple channels
    • Limiting the access to the information so that multiple teams can collaborate on ideas

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