Turning chemistry notation into something visible
SMILESBot is an open-source Discord bot for students and educators. It takes SMILES strings, a compact text notation for molecules, and renders them as molecular images that are easier to discuss in a shared channel.
A small tool shaped by a real learning problem
The idea came from studying general chemistry and trying to explain chemical structures through Discord. Text alone made the conversation difficult, so the project focused on making the visual representation available where the discussion was already happening.
A tool that found its audience
SMILESBot currently serves over 60 servers and over 30,000 users, and runs on Google VM instances. Those figures are part of the project's existing record and show the distance between a course-inspired experiment and a tool used by a broader community.
Demo
Gallery
What I learned
I learned that a project does not need to start with a large scope to become meaningful. Building for a problem I personally understood helped me make the tool approachable, and maintaining it taught me how real usage changes the way software should be designed.