Bottles Adrift!

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  Messages Adrift

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Inspiration

Our inspiration is the idea of bottling a message to toss out to sea in hopes that someone, somewhere will eventually find that bottle and read the message. We wanted to build a digital analogue to that idea, and tried to capture the same feelings of serendipitous joy and childlike wonder in sending and finding physical bottled messages.

What it does

Users send text messages to our Twilio number, representing messages put in bottles and cast out to sea. Our server keeps track of messages sent and will periodically choose a user to receive a bottled message. Users never receive a message sent by themselves.

How we built it

We built a backend server using Python standard libraries to process the HTTP POST requests sent by Twilio whenever our Twilio number receives a text. We used Twilio's Python library for sending out texts.

Challenges we ran into

It took us a while to correctly parse the POST request. Setting up Security Groups for AWS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we managed to bring an entire project to completion within such a short span of time despite our lack of experience. We had already completed the basic functionality by 3PM on Saturday and were able to focus the remainder of our time on improving robustness.

What we learned

Our team initially had very little experience with web technologies. None of us had any prior experience in writing a backend server. It was enjoyable to learn how to use a REST API like Twilio's and to write a server for handling HTTP POST requests. We also learned how to host servers using AWS instances.

What's next for Bottles Adrift

We will keep the servers running until we run out of free Twilio credits. There are potential monetization vectors (such as selling higher message limits to those who want to advertise via our platform) to offset Twilio's costs but we will most likely be moving on to other projects.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• python
• twilio