First Timers Track
Introduction
Welcome to HackRice 8! This track is intended for teams in which a majority of members have little to no experience with software development. We'll help you get started by providing instructions on how to set up your environment and providing some basic code for you to expand on. If you have attended previous hackathons, you're still welcome to use the provided code, but you won't be eligible to compete in the First Timers Track.
In this track, you'll create a bot and integrate it with an existing platform (e.g. messenger chatbot). You're free to use any platform you'd like, but we'll provide a detailed description and code for creating bots for Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Reddit. We're only providing you with enough to create a very simple, working bot -- it's up to you to build off of the base code we provide and make it useful or add functionality to solve a real world problem.
Bot Tutorials
If none of these platforms interest you, we encourage you to check out Alexa, Google Home, Discord, SMS, Twitter, GroupMe, Skype, etc.
FAQ
If you have any general questions about this track or about setting up your development environment, take a look at our FAQ. If you're still stuck, reach out to a mentor or one of the HackRice organizers and we'll be happy to point you in the right direction.