Michael Hays

Banduro is a chatbot management platform which allows non-technical users to create their own chatbots and deploy them on their business webpage. In order to make the deployment process as painless as possible for the users of Banduro, I designed an "injection" process, which allows a chatbot to be dynamically loaded into an iframe in the user's website. To make this work, the user simply needs to copy and paste two <script> elements to the webpage where the chatbot would run: one <script> with the ID of the chatbot, and another <script> with the logic to load that particular chatbot (linked above). The business webpage and the iframe communicate through the window.postMessage API, which allows each to know 1) when the chatbot iframe DOM element has loaded, 2) when the chatbot data model has been injected into the iframe, and 3) when the user opens or closes the chatbot.

urPlus is a collection of tools to enhance the Udacity reviewer/mentor experience, including integrated remark storage and retrieval. I initially created the tool for my own personal use, but later released it publicly under the GPL-3.0 when I realized how useful it could be to the Udacity review community. Within one month, the Chrome extension had over 120 downloads, which accounted for nearly 1/3 of all reviewers. In 2017, I moved on from the reviewing community and transferred the project to another reviewer, but am still extremely proud of how much it continues to help my fellow reviewers.