addy-help

I started this project as a way to break out of the rut I found myself in during the planning phase for a much larger app. With no concrete intentions other than exploring a few different APIs and building something cool, I started writing, researching, experimenting, and now I’m extremely happy to present the result of this endeavour: Addy the Discord Bot.

During my exploration with Addy there have been many hurdles and many lessons learned.

Here are some of the things I have learned from the journey so far:

  • How to handle third party APIs with less than stellar documentation and design

  • How to save data without making a database

  • The python requests library, and how to handle it’s response object

  • Explored Python’s dictionary and it’s functions

Addy doesn’t have a central theme as she really was meant to be a personal project, thus each of her commands came about simply from asking myself “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” Here are some of the things she can do now:

  • Look up a player in Runescape3

  • Create and add to a watch2gether room for you and your friends

  • Offer a word of encouragement or tell you a quote from Brooklyn 99

Of course every new feature sparks ideas for other improvements and the list keeps growing, but here are the additions I would like to make in the near future:

  • A backend to complement her, and allow to me save data more reliably.

  • A way for her to play music in a voice channel (worried about the legality here).

  • A Runescape item price look-up. (Their api is really bad, the easiest way to do this is to build a webcrawler and crawl their api once a week)

  • If you have a cool idea for Addy, contact me and let me know!

If you are interested in seeing Addy in action, I have set up a discord server for you to try. The browser version of discord doesn’t require you to log in. Jump right in and type !help to see all of her commands. a more in depth explanation can be found here.

Github repo