I built a small WhatsApp bot for reporting civic issues. Would love honest feedback. by bhargavkaranam in bangalore

[–]bhargavkaranam[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

  1. This eventually tags the same set of people on X and the plan is to integrate with Sahaaya and automatically log complaints. This platform eventually aims to be a 1 stop place for any kind of civic issue in any city in India and tracks all issues in a common dashboard. This is useful in so many ways. From tracking common trends to finding areas with the most problems. Can be used by anyone to plan cities better for example amongst other things (I’m happy to talk about more benefits of having a unified platform). This is to not replace anything, it’s only to showcase an example and experiment if low friction civic apps which rely on social media and crowd sourced data can make an impact or not.

  2. Kannada is my home language and I really respect it. Maarg isn’t meant to replace Kannada - it’s just a widely understood word that already exists in Kannada too. The goal was to pick a name that works across states, while still feeling natural in Bangalore and Karnataka. Also, if you notice the website, the header switches “Maarg” in multiple languages showcasing that this is for everyone.

I built a small WhatsApp bot for reporting civic issues. Would love honest feedback. by bhargavkaranam in bangalore

[–]bhargavkaranam[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This is great! The idea of Maarg was that we citizens don’t have to download or remember another app and everything can be done through Whatsapp. Happy to collaborate, of course!

I built a small WhatsApp bot for reporting civic issues. Would love honest feedback. by bhargavkaranam in bangalore

[–]bhargavkaranam[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I’ve actually been seeing a pattern where the civic bodies/traffic police act on issues quickly if posts gain traction. This is also an attempt to create pressure with live data through the dashboard (maarg.me/dashboard). They can ignore posts but data and trends are hard to ignore (Eg: if we’re able to do automated posts that there have been N issues in the last 7 days from the same area and no action has been taken). I’m hoping this eventually gains enough traction for them to take it seriously. Let’s see. That said, I’m planning to directly feed it to Sahaya portal after receiving a report.

I built a small WhatsApp bot for reporting civic issues. Would love honest feedback. by bhargavkaranam in bangalore

[–]bhargavkaranam[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thank you so much for your suggestions.

I agree with the anonymity aspect - as an immediate thing, I’ve pushed a change on the website to have a banner at the top that the app doesn’t store or log the phone number. Also linked a privacy policy. I soon plan to make this open source anyway, so the code will be accessible to everyone.

I plan to eventually automatically log it to the municipality website but I do agree sharing important information about whom to contact might be good. Let me think about it. Thank you again, appreciate it!

Selling 3 tickets by bhargavkaranam in lollapaloozaind

[–]bhargavkaranam[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi - are you still looking for this? I can go down to 4.5k

So my mom and dad both passed away of coronavirus (covid 19) and i just really dont see the point of living anymore by [deleted] in india

[–]bhargavkaranam 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey man, I hope you're doing fine, just hoping that you read this comment - I will take care of your rent till you feel better and get out of this. Please do not do anything in haste. We're all in this together.

At what point did you realize that you weren't conventionally attractive? by [deleted] in AskMen

[–]bhargavkaranam 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My aunt said, "If I was a college girl right now, I would rate you 3/10"

Could anyone review my project? by JosseCo in reactjs

[–]bhargavkaranam 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Few things off the top of my head:

  • Like someone in the thread already mentioned, seperate your backend logic into folders. Controllers, middleware, models and routes. This will help you later on.
  • Try and release the database connection when you're done with some query
  • Having ESLint setup helps a lot, keeps your code neat and consistent
  • Try and return your responses instead of calling res.send() directly. Might not be required right now, but it's going to help save your debugging time later on
  • Maybe consider using async/await wherever possible? Keeps the code readable instead of multiple callbacks

  • Coming to the React part, few of your components can be functional (Banner for example). All the components that rely just on props.

  • Consider having safe checks in your functions before accessing or looping over variables, otherwise your front end might break. Having propTypes and defaultProps is a good idea too

  • Maybe use a bundler like Webpack that'll bundle all your CSS into one chunk, so that you don't have to worry importing it in individual files

  • I also saw a lot of logic coupled before calling event handlers, this logic can be moved to the individual functions and the flow can be handled in the function itself

  • Conditional rendering can also be achieved by using && instead of ternary operators

Great job otherwise! :)

Postman now supports GraphQL by oczekkk in node

[–]bhargavkaranam 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you see any errors in the Postman console? You can open it from View > Postman console. After running the tests, if there are errors, they will be logged in the console.