Hacking my way through NUS

From prototyping to real world usage

Raivat (CS’22)

About me

CS + USP (now NUS College) ‘22

Founding engineer

Attendance bot

Missing my bus to class

Attendance bot

Attendance bot

Attendance bot: Prototype

built in recess week

team of 3 friends (Advay, Chaitanya)

grew with word of mouth in CS2040

got feedback

Attendance bot: Product

used in CS1101S, first customer

worked closely with users

5 years in use, ~4k users

happy customer ☺️

2023

low/no maintenance

Attendance bot: learnings

tech: telegram api, python, aws, devops, data cleaning, google api, maintenance, system design

non-tech: working with users, technical and non-technical

Food delivery

covid circuit breaker in 2020

telegram channel to group orders and save on delivery fee

grew with word of mouth

manual ordering and updating

Food delivery: Prototype

Food Delivery: no Product?

it worked well for a while

however, limited use case

great learning even w/o “coding” anything

Food Delivery: learnings

tech: system design, payment APIs

non-tech: working with users, understanding value proposition, problem decomposition, knowing when to stop

AI teaching assistant

tried building something like ChatGPT for learning to program

built at my own annoyance of not finding it easy to learn to program

crowd-source question-answer pairs from students

AI teaching assistant: Failed prototype?

not enough traction

again great learning!

AI teaching assistant: learnings

tech: dialog flow, python, telegram api, AI-concepts, system design

non-tech: problem decomposition, working with users

The product spectrum

Can use

Do use

Pay to use

Attendance Bot

Food Delivery

AI teaching assistant

Fun fact

Attendance bot mapped to CP3108B (pass/fail, 4 credits)

AI teaching assistant mapped to CP3106 (graded, 4 credits)

you can do the same… build something cool and map it later on

PS: You have a BIG advantage

Chrome extension

Outro

it’s ok to fail (and why not get academic credit for it 😉)

the best time to build is NOW

prototype-first, ok to stop there

chase impact, not fancy tech