Projects: evangeln/ChatBot

Now in my first year of university, Ι had the opportunity to work in a group project which was a real challenge for me. As I had to think about how I can use all my skills and my knowledge so in the end I would have the perfect and desirable result. The project was to create a “Chat Bot”. As a team we had to find a theme for the Chat Bot and what it is going to be able to do. The bot that we created is a multi-purpose bot which can detect different things which regards the weather, the location, the time and it’s a search engine as well etc. For example, it can tell the user the temperature, UV index of the sun, wind and other multiple things which has to do with the weather about any place in the world. Furthermore, the bot can show to the user the distance between the place you are in and the destination you want to go to. Another thing that the bot can do is tell the user the exact time. In my opinion the things that the bot can do are very useful as they can help support human needs in their everyday life. To bring this project to an end, we had to work as a team and help each other in any problems that were raised because by doing it this way, it helped us as individuals as well. What I mean by that is that sometimes we have similar problems in our coding and we had to make a meeting all together so that we can suggest ideas about how we can solve the problem. My contribution to this project was that I write the code for the weather part. Moreover, my code contains search engine where you can search anything you want in the webpage “wikipedia”. It was a real challenge for me as I never did something similar before. I manage to write code where I attached API which needs input from the user in order to generate the output. It really helps me the fact that I already knew another programming language (C++) very well, because this makes me obtain creative problem solving which is a skill that is needed to become a good programmer and can get over any situation no matter what. Some people from the team had some issues with their coding and I showed them my code so that I can support them and explain to them exactly what is needed for their code to solve the problem that they had. After helping the others from my team and after having a look at their codes as well I realised that it was missing something very important from my code , so I changed my code and made it a bit more complicated and start thinking of the details that were missing from it, like important messages that the bot has to say so that it can communicate easily with the user! In the end I was facing a big problem about how the bot detects the user’s errors and prints a message to the user. Finally, I solved this by watching tutorials on how to do it and reading the discord documentation. The collaboration with the team started well but along the way the communication between us as a team was not going well. More specifically, everyone in the team was working in their codes without taking any help or asking anything about the code to the other members of the team about their coding problems. After a while we had to talk about how the code was going for everyone so that we can clarify important questions so that were going to help us keep working with our individual tasks. In the conversation we had some people from the team get angry with each other because they had different opinions about what the bot should have been doing. This happens because a member of the team didn’t want to follow the plan that we have said at the beginning because he was thinking that the idea was a bit cheap to work on it and make something different and creative, so we had to change the theme of the bot. It was very difficult for us to change the theme as we had already worked much and write coding. We have been trying to convince him to continue working with our starting theme, but we continue having disagreements. In the end we didn’t have a choice but to change the theme, this helped us all get along and work better and more productively as a team. All it has to do with the final image of the project I think that this we manage to create is very successful. To bring it to the end it was needed to have good communication with all the members in the team, patience and different way of thinking so that I can figure out how to solve difficult problems with the coding that troubled me a lot. Good things about our code is that we manage to bring it to an advanced level and create a user-friendly bot with useful and justified information to give. The disadvantage of the project is that the API we are using it doesn’t give us the most information we could have. If I had more time, I would have search more to find a better API and bring my code one step forward to give more information to the user and be more and more advanced. The skills that I have developed is teamwork, I learned the language of API and I have developed more problem-solving skills. I have also learned how discord works and I have developed my skills in python programming language. I would love to work again in a similar and such an interesting project because you develop your skills and your abilities and became stronger from the difficulties you face in the project.