In my quest to enhance my productivity and stay organized, I embarked on a side project to build a custom digital journal for myself 📒. The idea was to store information about my friends like their birthdays, anniversaries, work-anniversaries etc. so that I never forget anything about any of my friends.
I created a web app called themindmap. Here I can add my friends and then add information about them which I can view later.
Soon I realised that a webapp is probably good for adding information about people but for quick & easy access, I need a mobile app. A mobile app can send me notifications as well on birthdays and anniversaries of my friends. I was too lazy to read about mobile app development so being an engineer, I thought of a hack → Telegram Bot
Why not WhatsApp? Because it’s difficult to onboard to whatsapp and use their APIs as an individual developer. You need to onboard as a business/company.
Building the Bot 🤖
The first step was to create a new bot on Telegram. This was done by interacting with BotFather, a bot provided by Telegram for managing other bots. I then integrated this bot with my webapp and provided an option in the MindMap’s profile page to enable OR disable telegram notifications
I started running a cron-job everyday to check if there is any birthday, anniversary or any other event today that I should know about, and then send notification for those events on telegram. This made life much simpler.
I also added search functionality so that I can search information any of my friends from my MindMap. It was pretty handy to use:
Chat Based Reminder System 🗓️
I have used a lot of todo apps in last couple of years but I never did stick to anyone of them. I always feel that they are a bit over-complicated for the simple requirement I have. I just need something very handy where I can mention the reminder message and the date when I need that reminder. I thought of building a simple chat based reminder system using themindmap telegram bot.
I had to do some dirty hacks for text parsing to grab the date from the text message and very soon, I had my own personal chatbot (no fancy AI is used here I promise 😜)
Now I can send a text message to add a reminder and the bot will message me on that day as a reminder 🎉
Conclusion
Working on side project is always exciting. Building Mindmap has been a very fun and rewarding experience for me. I got to experiment with a lot of tools and technologies. In the end, I have a tool that I personally use and rely on very heavily in my day to day life.
If you find this article interesting, please do checkout MindMap here:
👉🏾 https://themindmap.app/
If you have worked on any side projects in your free time, let me know in the comment section. I would love to check them out.
Thanks for reading ❤️ ❤️!!!
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