GroupMe Botkit

A web app to easily let you create GroupMe bots

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Inspiration

I was done with my original project at VandyHacks and still had some time left, so I was bored. While getting the massage at the Wellness event, GroupMe Botkit just popped in my mind so I decided to challenge myself to finish as I could by 9 AM Sunday. Prior to this, a lot of my friends have asked me how to make GroupMe bots, so I thought this would be a great tool for them if they don't want to learn coding. I was also noticing a lot of the same code being rewritten over and over again, so I thought this would be a useful tool to tackle that. Also, this was an excuse for me to learn React.

What is GroupMe Botkit?

GroupMe Botkit is meant to ease the process of creating simple GroupMe chatbots, aimed towards people with no programming experience. Users can log into this app and enter an API key from the GroupMe dev portal (and enter the app's url on that portal), after which they can set responses to "activation texts" that will trigger the bot. They can also manage all the bots they create from the main portal in this app.

How I built it

I used React for the front-end, making full use of the Material UI library. The back-end is all in Firebase (authentication, hosting, realtime database, cloud functions). For the actual functioning of the chatbot, I just used the GroupMe's amazing REST API. Although this is all running serverless in one place, it supports multiple bots from multiple users.

Challenges I ran into

  • Never used React before (learned it at the workshop) - got stuck a few times.
  • Had very less amount of time (~10 hours).
  • Firebase has a lot of things still in beta, which with poor/incorrect documentation, can lead to lots of googling.
  • Caffeine crash finally hit me and I couldn't write code anymore.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Despite all the challenges and sleep deprivation, I still managed to make a lot of progress and made a surprisingly beautiful product that does work after all. The UX is great, right from login to saving, and the app overall is pretty simple to use.

What I learned

  • React is amazing for fast-paced development.
  • Firebase is not as amazing as it sounds (yet).
  • Sleep is important.

What's next for GroupMe Botkit

The original goal was to make this app the one place for users (technical and non-technical alike) to create and share their GroupMe bots. Due to lack of time constraints, most of those features may not have made it to the app, but one thing I definitely do want to add is the ability to trigger cloud functions and return a message to be sent to the chat - this alone would be so powerful because of the endless possibilities, so I want to make it a reality.

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