WinterBuddy

WinterBuddy is a project and team committed to providing winter-themed services, knowledge, and charity. It features Frosty the chatbot, a winter donation service, a "Living Winter Library" and more.

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💡Inspiration

This project came to fruition due to the 2022 Winter Hackcoming 2 Hackathon hosted by Major League Hacking. We wanted to create services that would help others during the winter months.

🤖What it does

WinterBuddy is a collection of services.

  1. Frosty the ChatBot - Frosty will text you every morning at a time that you specify and will give you suggestions on how heavy or light to dress depending on what he reads on the weather forecasts of your local area.
  2. The Living Winter Library - The Living Winter Library is a library of information created to help our readers prosper this winter season. A new winter "hack" (Tip, trick, general advice, etc.) is added to an ever-growing collection of wisdom daily.
  3. The Safe Driving Program - the most dangerous season to drive.
  4. The Donation Hub - in hopes no one is left without a jacket during wintertime.

☕How we built it

We created the website using Velo by Wix and used Coil for our donation and shopping web page needs. We found a weather API on OpenWeather.com that we combined with the Twilio API by calling the Sid, AUTH, and host phone numbers. After adding these to my Python script, I hosted it on EverthingPython.com.

💔Challenges we ran into

  1. We had many people come in and out of our group. People would join a little while later, saying they couldn't be part of the team anymore. This led us without a 4th group member for a while, as we could only trial-run one person at a time. This constant uncertainty led to a bit of anxiety amongst the group, yet we maintained our composure and confidence until we, fortunately, found our permanent 4th member.

🏅Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since many team members are still beginners, we are very proud of our accomplishments. We created a beautiful-looking website with excellent copy, implemented high-quality features onto that website, had excellent teamwork, created a clean-cut demo and entertaining advertisement, and had developers that created complex programs in a short timeframe.

🧊What's next for WinterBuddy

If people find value in WinterBuddy and there's enough interest in the project, who knows, maybe we'll turn it into an entire operation in hopes that no one will go cold again.

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