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Make your own always-online Telegram Bot – A Practical Introduction to Cloud Computing
This workshop aims to teach you how to make your own "always-online" Telegram bot that lives in the cloud. Unlike most tutorials you'll find online that involves polling methods – meaning the bot runs on your computer, and once your computer shuts down your bot is dead – this workshop aims to teach you how to leverage cloud providers like AWS (Amazon Web Services) to give you an always online service at almost zero cost.
What will I get to do in each session?
- Session 1: Make a basic bot that tells random fun facts about SUTD, yourself, or your cat.
- Session 2: Make a bot that can make a to-do list per user and remember it for later.
- Session 3: Make a bot that, when sent an image, can tell you whether the image contains a hotdog or not. And also eat hotdogs.*
*depends on whether I manage to convince IAP office to give me money to buy hotdogs for y'all Update: they said no 😭. The school is running out of money for Student Life and that's a FACT.
What this workshop is not
We are not making an intelligent chatbot like Alexa or Siri. If you're interested in AI-related subjects, I recommend you attend the Learn with Google AI and TensorFlow 2.0 workshops in conjunction with this.
Do I need coding experience to join this workshop?
Unfortunately, yes you do. BUT you only need a very basic understanding of Python to be able to join this workshop. If you've already taken Digital World, this should not be a problem for you. If you haven't (you are a freshie with no experience), you only need to learn up to and familiarise yourself with Python's dictionary datatype. This can be easily achieved by dedicating just two afternoons of your holiday following online courses. It'll make your life in Digital World significantly easier as well, so why not kill two birds with one stone hotdog?
If you are a complete freshie and still want to join, you can still register for the workshop if you promise to at least try catching up to the required level. Simply indicate so in the signup form and I will direct you to resources where you can learn the basics of Python.
Staff, Masters and PhD students are also welcome to join this workshop, as long as you have that basic understanding of Python.
Anything else I need to prepare?
Instructions on how to set up your environment for development will be sent out once you register and your place is confirmed. More importantly, you also must create an AWS account (it's free) and finish the activiation process at least a day before starting this workshop. Otherwise, you will not be able to deploy your bot onto the cloud as AWS places some restrictions on newly registered, unverified accounts.
Is this workshop free? Do I have to pay for the bot?
This workshop is free, yes. Newly created AWS accounts have free tier for one year, meaning you get to use their servers for free. Even if you're out of free tier, this method of hosting telegram bots costs very little, assuming you're not a bot that everyone around the world spams every minute like Quizarium bot.
To demonstrate, I was charged $0.04 last month for all my Telegram bots combined. Stonks.