Remote-Personal-Assistant

Think like Plankton's wife, but better. Helps to keep me organized in a way I have total control over.

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Inspiration

I have very little time to plan on my own, so the hope is that this will help to make me more productive by automating scheduling and centralizing my tasks.

What it does

Offers a two-sided interface to a database with schedule and task information, which can be accessed via fire-chicken-egg.com and also via a phone number equipped to take commands via SMS.

How I built it

With Elisa we split up between designing TwiML documents, formatting views to accept Twilio's POST requests, generating models for tasks and events, and creating the $MESH (Mike and Elisa's Shell) to accept a wide array of commands via SMS.

Challenges I ran into

CSRF features of Django weren't compatible with Twilio, and would have taken hours of googling to solve had it not been for the HuskyHacks mentors. Many thanks to Kevin and Arjun for help. Elisa had to overcome not knowing any Python or Jinja to work with me on this project as well.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I made my own shell that I could name after me and my partner, so that's worth it in and of itself. Also actually sat down and did this project, which I had been dreaming of doing for well over a year now.

What I learned

How HTTP Post requests work, how to really use Twilio well. A little bit of MySQL. That I can stay up for a full 24 hours. Oh, and let's not forget that Elisa is an awesome person for rolling with me on this very obscure project for a whole 24 hours.

What's next for Remote-Personal-Assistant

The RPA was always meant to be customizable by me for whatever I needed, so scripts will be built on as new needs of mine arise. Soon I'll probably put a CronJob-like controller script in there that will automate scheduled tasks, and integrate that with Twilio's phone features to make a persistent phone-call-alarm-clock to make sure I don't sleep through classes. Then I may team up with my boyfriend (the hardware geek of the power couple) and integrate the website and SMS capabilities with some IoT gadgets he cooks up.

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