What is QuartzGuard
Skip to Theory Of Operation for the nerdy stuff
QuartzGuard is a Discord bot that I made over the course of two weeks, entirely written in Python. The name is just the first thing I could come up with, Quartz (me) and Guard, as in guarding the Discord channel that I made just to create this bot. The original intention was to automatically check for player deaths, new players, and to announce them into a private Discord server of just me and the bot to notify me. However, I thought it would be so cool if I could have player deaths show up on the website, as well as display any player who joined the server, and thus I wanted to be able to share with anyone who would want to join the server, especially with all the work I put into it.
Why it took so long
This version of the bot is actually a rewrite of the first week. I spent the first week with noble intentions, but then got impatient and committed the computer sin of copying and pasting code, as after a couple of days, I wanted to be finished, as I did not want to open the server until the bot was done. I had achieved getting player deaths and announcing them by myself, but in order to upload to my website, I needed to programmatically create HTML and utilize the REST API built into WordPress. And while I am familiar with REST, HTML is not my strong point. So after about four days of Stack Overflow and copying and pasting, my code no longer worked, and since I did not write it, I had no clue how it worked. Programming is a hobby for me that I have done off and on for the last 6 years. I would consider myself at the intermediate level, and while not the most impressive I’ve done, this has been the biggest program I’ve ever made. Yet, I could not be proud of it, while it was a bigger program, I didn’t write most of it, and I had no idea what it did. So about 6 days in, I deleted everything and started over.
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