This readme will serve as the update history for this exercise. I'm hoping to complete everything I want within the 3-5 day time period.
The main goals that I want to accomplish for this are:
- Showcase my skillset in a meaningful way
- Use as much of the tech listed in the "Our Stack" section of the original readme
As I gain confidence with what I'm doing, these goals may change to include more items, but for now, they will serve as my starting point.
I wanted to start things off simple. Seeing as Botkit seems to have an extensive amount of documentation available for multiple platforms, I thought it would be best to start with a slack bot.
Rick and Morty is one of my favorite shows, so I figured a Mr. Meeseeks bot would be fun to work on. It's a very naive chat bot, but I plan to come back to make him a little more robust with the way he responds with what he 'hears'.
My next goal is to do something with Messenger, then finally move on to creating a bot via API.ai.
Decided to go the route of building out a front end with React today. Bot will most likely be made with API.ai. I decided to put the Messenger bot on the backburner, since it does not allow me to show any custom front-end work.
The following goals may include some assumptions based on what I was able to skim through on the API.ai site.
They may not be 100% accurate, but I want to have a set plan for myself first to make sure I stay on track.
Goals for this implementation:
- Make chat bot
through API.aithrough recast.ai
- Seems like API.ai no longer allows for free API access to domains without upgrading your account?
- Allow user input and show output in React app
- Make mobile responsive
Rick bot set up through recast.ai with a handful of replies based on user intents. I'm having React display the messages, but it's definitely not pretty yet.
Goals 1 and 2 from yesterday seem to be taken care of. From here it looks like it's just css work and some refinement to Rick bot. Hopefully I'll have time to experiment with an image recognition bot for Messenger afterwards.
Goals set on the 28th seem to be completed. Unsure if I will have enough time to get a Messenger bot fully functioning, but I'm reasonably happy with what I was able to complete.
Doing some general clean up and refactoring if necessary.
In the end, besides HTML/CSS, I was really only able to use React, Node, and Hapi when going through this exercise, which is why I'm only reasonably happy with my work.
Things I could have done better:
- UI on chat bot with Rick is pretty minimal; the design could be improved
- I'm not sure if I followed best practices for React, so looking into that would be good
- Refining Rick's responses by training
- The responses are still pretty limited, with only 3 intents defined for possible user input