Despite attending college at the University of Washington, a school largely funded by Paul Allen and a place where computer science is second-nature to most, I’d never had the chance to participate in a Hackathon before this summer. I had images in my mind of hundreds of coders crammed in windowless rooms tap-tapping away on their laptops all night long, but had always been eager to experience this abnormal, fast-paced and competitive work environment (even before I had the necessary programming skills to do so). I knew that some of my best work had come out of last-minute marathons before deadlines, and wanted to see what I could create. The perfect opportunity to test the Hackathon waters came this summer, with Discord’s 2019 Hack Week. I was already an expert in using Discord’s API and had previously created Discord Bots similar to the ones they were asking us to create (though the ones made during Hack Week had to be entirely new code). The projects were to be completed in teams of up to 5 people, which I liked because I knew I’d learn way more working with a group of people with a range of experience than alone doing what I already knew how to do.
To jump ahead, the project I completed (in a group consisting of two programmers and one designer) can be found at dittobot.fyi and on my github. It’s open-source and hosted on Heroku, comes with full documentation, and is one of the creations I’m most proud of (even though we didn’t win).
Ditto solves a problem that has plagued Discord servers since the company’s inception: media files, photos and other documents easily get lost in Discord chats, and even the ability to “pin” or search for a message doesn’t always help, since the images aren’t tagged with metadata and there are only so many pins allowed per channel. If there’s a channel devoted entirely to music or art, you’d have to scroll for ages to find that one image you think you may have seen three weeks ago. Ditto’s solution is to copy, tag and store the files you wish to keep track of in libraries that can be referenced and shared with anyone in any channel. Watch the video to the left to see Ditto in action (includes bonus pictures of my adorable cat), and check out our website to see the bot’s full functionality.