Reflections

The Programming for Online Prototyping course was an interesting journey which allowed us to explore multiple platforms and 'learn by doing' in an unknown territory.

I learnt that while bots may seem simple, the execution behind them can be fairly complex. Even more interesting was trying to build a personality for the bot - thinking of all the responses from a personality perspective was helpful in providing unique user experiences through different bots.

Also, during API selection it was critical to study carefully what the APIs provide as compared to their websites and which functionalities are free and which ones are paid for. If one is working with a fairly new API, things are likely to change quickly and affect how the app works.

If I have one takeaway from this course, it's this: practice let's you make more intelligent mistakes rather than the easier ones. One should never be afraid of an error - fixing errors is more learning than writing code.

References

• The Slack API has brilliant documentation and can be found here.
  
• The Yummly API allows one to search through recipes by ingredients, by dietary restrictions and many other parameters. It's documentation can be found here.
  
• Other discoveries I made which were very useful while making this bot can be found at the tail end of this document here.
  
• The icons for this bot were sourced from the noun project. Here I credit the creators for the icons I used: Woman created by Hea Poh Lin, List created by Ben Markoch, Cook book anonymous, add by Created by Alexander Smith.

Thanks

I would like to thank Professor Daragh Byrne for constant encouragement and extremely detailed instructions through class lectures, demos, exercises and online resources that he has created. For anyone building bots and other web based zero UI services, his online repo is an invaluable resource:

https://github.com/daraghbyrne/onlineprototypes2016repo/tree/master/code-samples