Devlog #4: Bot Architecture Cleanup, Persistence & Statistical Charts

Hey everyone! Here’s an update on what I’ve been working on for my project over the past few days.

The biggest new feature is visual weekly statistics! Now users can see a chart/graph of their activity over the course of the week.

The Challenge: Storing data per user, per specific activity, and across each day of the week.
The Solution: Kept it clean and simple using user_data.
Persistence: Added persistent storage so data isn’t lost on restart. Honestly, I was mind-blown by how powerful Python persistence is—enabling this took literally just a couple of lines of code!

I decided it was time to break up my codebase into multiple modules/files:

Separation of Concerns: Initially, my architecture felt a bit messy—files knew too much about each other’s internal logic and were tightly coupled. I refactored the project so that each file and module is more autonomous and encapsulated.
Troubleshooting: Splitting the code broke a few things at first, but after a bit of debugging, everything is working smoothly now.

I made several quality-of-life improvements to make the bot feel much more robust:

Daily Log Reminders: Added a daily reminder prompting users to log their data for the day. (Note: Users just need to run /start once to initialize reminders and resets).
Strict Input Validation: Added input filters. If a step requires a number, invalid text is rejected; if it asks to pick an activity, custom inputs are blocked.
Python vs C++ appreciation: Coming from a C++ background, it constantly amazes me how complex user interactions and data handling can be written in just a few lines of Python!

What’s Next?