For the past few years, I have been maintaining a list of quotes. These quotes are just things I've heard, been sent, whatever that have made me go "Yeah, that is a sentence that exists". Over the years I have amassed hundreds of these quotes, I use them whenever I need a slogan, placeholder text, a laugh, etc. The chat application Discord added a feature where you can put a message on your profile that disappears at the end of the day, so I started making mine a random quote from my list.

The problem is this is tedious. Each day I would need to generate a random number, then open the list, scroll down to whatever number I got, copy it, and paste it into Discord. That's like 30 seconds out of my day! So I went ahead and spent several hours over several days automating it, because I'm a programmer and that's what we do.

Ideally, this is a program that would run with little to no input from me. Fortunately, Discord has an API which would allow us to do this remotely, so I went ahead and registered a new bot with Discord's API so that I wouldn't be testing this on my personal Discord account. After adding the Bot to my server, I went ahead and began creating a proof of concept. Fortunately, Quahu on GitHub created a lovely C# wrapper for Discord's API, a language I was already accustomed to, and I got to work. I got the Bot's API key, and set a status indicating that it was playing a game, and it worked perfectly! So I attempted to set a custom status through the API...and it didn't work. Several hours of reading documentation later, it turns out that although on paper supported by the API, setting a custom status through code doesn't actually...do anything. Furthermore, I found that "Automated User Accounts", even something as trivial as what I was attempting to do here, are against Discord's terms of service, and thus had I continued on this path I would have seen my account promptly terminated.

So, my grand plan of a fire and forget system seemed to be dead in the water, but it wasn't a total failure. Remember, my primary motivation for embarking on this project is to try and speed up my daily routine of putting a quote in my Discord status, so as long as my new solution is faster than manually generate random number, manually open quote list, manually scroll to number, manually copy, manually paste, it's a win. As such, I pivoted to a new goal: create an app to allow me to quickly and easily get a random quote from the list. As a bonus, this also gave me an excuse to learn .NET on its own, as beforehand I only had used it in conjunction with the Unity game engine.

For this new application, there are two requirements: It should be easy to use, and it should get new content from my list on its own. To tackle the ease of use problem, I quickly designed a mockup of the user interface in MSPaint. Three elements: A quote number for the title, a text box to display the quote, and a single button to get another one. Simple.

Getting new content was a bit trickier. I considered moving the list to a text document hosted on a home server, but quickly decided against it as I feared it would be too annoying to access remotely quickly. I then had an epiphany: The List document is already in the cloud -- I was using Google Docs to store it. Furthermore, you could generate a permanent download link to give you the document in plain text. With this knowledge, I knew my application lifecycle would be this.

Download new version of list from Google Docs (this would handle any new additions) -> wait for the user to click the button -> generate a random number -> display that quote number.

It turns out designing an user interface, at least a super minimal one like I was planning on using here, is super easy in .NET. Visual Studio provides a suite of drag & drop tools, and within a few minutes I had transitioned my crudely drawn mockup into something ready for code.

On application startup, I used the Webclient from System.Net to download a new copy of The List text document from Google. I made the deliberate choice to not do this asynchronously, as the way my application is setup, it cannot do anything before it has the document, so it is fine if it hangs for a few milliseconds at startup -- it's only downloading a handful of kilobytes anyways. Once downloaded, I parsed the file into an array, trimming off the first few lines as they are a header and not needed for what we are doing here. Finally, we wait for the user to click the button, at which point we pick a number up to the length of the array we just created, and set whatever quote is at that array index as the text in the textbox.

And it worked. Brilliantly I might add. The application does exactly what I designed it to do, requires no maintenance due to all data being stored in the cloud, and makes my daily routine 5% easier. This project taught me not only the fundamentals of UI programming in .NET, but also how to re-adjust and pivot when things do not go according to plan.