UHelper

UHelper is a Discord bot created for our CSC207 group project at the University of Toronto. It leverages the Java Discord API to assit students with time management, wellness, and study routines.

Technologies

• Java Discord API(JDA): This is the heart of our bot. It provides a highly customizable interface for bot interactions, allowing us to build and manage our use cases effectively.
• EDAMAM API: We utilize this API to fetch recipes from across the web, offering personalized options and nutritional information. It is especially useful for users who want to keep a healthy diet.
• Amazon EC2 & PM2: For continuous cloud hosting of the bot.

Highlights

My contributions mainly focused on implementing one of the core use case - generating recipe suggestions with EDAMAM API and setting up bot hosting.

Here’s a closer look at my specific contributions:

• Recipe Pagination: Developed a paginator template to overcome Discord's 25-embed limit, allowing users to navigate recipe suggestions via buttons. This solution also enhanced the UHelper Wiki, enabling smoother command exploration.

• Command Manager: The bot’s commands were refactored using a Command Manager Class, organizing them by feature. This improved the structure, making the code cleaner and easier to maintain for future updates.

• Cloud Hosting: Took the initiative to explore cloud hosting beyond the course scope by setting up Amazon EC2 with PM2, ensuring 24/7 uptime for the bot. This scalable solution streamlined the hosting process and removed the need for manual interventions. Detailed and user-friendly hosting guide is also created to help the entire team manage and maintain the bot effectively. This process not only enhanced my technical skills but also fostered collaboration as I shared my knowledge with teammates to ensure smooth operations and collaborations.

While I was dedicated to these areas, my brilliant teammates made significant contributions in other crucial aspects of the bot. They worked on developing additional features and managing the core functionalities such as event scheduling, notifications, and study assistance tools. Their efforts enabled users to set up exam and assignment reminders, utilize study quizzes, improve time management with Pomodoro timers as well as playing mini games for fun.

Conclusion

Contributing to UHelper gave me hands-on experience with Java, API integration, AWS, and technical writing. I really enjoyed collaborating with my team on this project—we brainstormed, built, and tested features together, which made the whole experience both fun and rewarding.