DM'er - A compatability rating system for Instagram
This was my first ever personal coding project. It was completed at Electric City Hacks 2017, and besides some rudamentary courses, was my introduction to programming. Here are a couple of things I was quoted saying:
"Is VS Code a language?"
"What's the difference between Notepad and Notepad++? Is there Notepad++ for Mac?"
"I think my computer froze, I can't get out of this, how do I exit this, should I just restart my computer?" (I accidentally stumbled into Vim)
An absolute novice.
We did not take ourselves seriously whatsoever, but that worked to our advantage. We decided that our project was going to be a compatability rating system that compared two different Instagram accounts, did some "math" to determine compatability, and if the threshold was above a certain value, generate a pickup line and send it to the other person.
I worked on the "math" portion as well as the pickup line generator. This involved comparing values from each account such as: followers, following, posts, likes, etc, and shooting out a number between 0 and 1. The higher the score the more compatable the two accounts. I used a web scraper in Python to get the data for the matching "algorithm," and then found a Python library that generated the pickup lines. It was a simple database of pre-written pickup lines that was just randomly picked from, but at the time it was magic to me.
Although we couldn't get the actual sending of the pickup line to work, everything else did. You'd enter two Instagram accounts, and then it'd scrape the web for that data, run the "algorithm", and then display a pickup line if it's above a 0.7 threshold. It was amazing. Surprisingly we won a small award for being in the top 15 teams, in which we each took home a year long subscription to WolframOne. We were amazed.
Mistakes and Lessons Learned
At the time I had no idea what an API was, so it did not occur to me that I could simply use the Instagram API to get the profile information rather than scrape the web for the values in the HTML of the page. This same API could've been used to get the messaging system working.
The lessons learned were tremendous, since that event I had finally found what I was interested in, and I began to delve deeper and deeper into the world of coding.