Data Projects and Discord Bots

Writing Sample for Brilliant, Data Science Producer

If you haven’t been to a video game convention such as PAX (the Penny Arcade Expo) before, let me paint a picture for you. After you push through the thousands of fans and cosplayers crowding around the massive Nintendo, Sony, Ubisoft or Square Enix booths with hundred-inch flat screen TVs and LEDs flashing from signs hanging off the ceiling, at the very back of the convention hall is the Indie Mega Booth, where developers of around 80 indie games are chosen to showcase their work and get feedback from con-goers. And then, maybe upstairs, in another corner of the show floor, are 10 more indie games highlighted as the PAX 10, the indie games of the year that have been designated the “best” by some committee. But what do they mean by “best”? What factors go into determining which of the thousand games released each year will succeed, which will be remembered for years to come, which will fade away with time, and which will never even make it into the (albeit somewhat faded) spotlight?

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.

If you’re anything like me, the summer of 2016 meant the summer of Pokémon GO, where everywhere you turned it seemed like there wasn’t anyone not playing this nostalgic augmented reality game of catching fake little monsters from your phone. You played too, because, well, everyone was doing it and the Pokémon World was kind of better than the real one. However, unlike me, you probably stopped playing a few months later once the initial hype wore off. For the past 2 years (starting around the beginning of 2017), I’ve been one of the lead moderators for the Chicago Pokémon GO Discord server and helped it grow from a handful of players up to 9,000 members today. This “job” has included all kinds of work including event planning, writing, creating a website with merch, and countless hours moderating chat and helping newcomers. The biggest and best part of this job, though, has been developing bots to help moderate, answer repetitive questions so that we don’t have to tell people the same thing over and over again, and provide information to users including Pokémon typing and stats, comparisons between ‘mons of different stats, a leaderboard for the competitive folks, and links to the server/website/etc…