Motivation

In our student council room we’ve had a digital signage information screen for basically forever.

The scren displays information on the current mensa menu, fill level of the soda machine, weather (current, prediction and rain radar), upcomming events, public transit (bus, tram, train and bike share) and gym occupancy. While doing some other work on it, I switched the source for weather data from OpenWeather  to Open-Meteo . Open-Meteo provides more data which is distributed among fewer different APIs and at a pricing model that fits us.

Motivation

Some friends and I often eat in the mensa at our faculty. Now eating together is nicer than alone, but coordinating this is hard especially with different and varying schedules. But I wouldn’t be genuine CS students if I didn’t try to solve this problem with technology… so I wrote a Matrix Chat Bot using maubot that posts the day’s menu, you can reply when you’ll eat and see when others will eat.

Motivation

Recently I wrote two Matrix (as in the communication protocol) bots using maubot .

• The MensaBot can tell you today’s menu in the canteen. It also supports you in finding a time when you can go to the canteen together with you friends or co-workers.
• The ReminerBot is target towards students and can remind you of several university related deadlines. It can remind you of the deadlines to register for or de-register from your exams, pay your semester fee or to register for the universities recreational sports courses. You’ll never miss these deadlines again!

During the years in which I really learned to program I was exposed a lot to the Django web framework . I also worked a lot with it during these years. Now, 5 years later, it is still the framework that I have the most experience with.