CSE '23 Birthday Bot

🎂 Automated Birthday Flyer Bot

A fully automated birthday celebration system that generates personalized flyers and posts them to Telegram and Discord every birthday — with zero infrastructure cost.

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🚀 What it does

Every day at 12:00 AM (Sri Lanka Time), a scheduled GitHub Actions workflow checks a list of approximately 200 classmates' birthdays.

When it finds a birthday, it automatically:

1. 🔍 Detects and crops the person's face from their photo.
2. 🎨 Composites the cropped image into a pre-designed birthday flyer with their name.
3. 📤 Publishes the completed flyer with a birthday caption to both Telegram and Discord.

Everything runs automatically using GitHub Actions — no servers, manual intervention, or hosting costs.

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✨ Key Features

• 🎉 Fully Automated

  • Daily scheduled execution with no manual triggering.

• 🖼️ AI-Assisted Image Processing

  • Detects and crops faces automatically using OpenCV.
  • Falls back to a centered crop if face detection fails.

• 📢 Multi-Platform Delivery

  • Posts birthday flyers simultaneously to:
    • Telegram
    • Discord

• 🕛 Accurate Sri Lankan Timezone Support

  • Correctly computes the current date in Asia/Colombo instead of relying on GitHub Actions' UTC timezone, preventing birthdays from being skipped around midnight.

• 🛡️ Resilient by Design

  • Gracefully handles failures without stopping the workflow.
  • Missing image → skipped safely.
  • Face detection failure → centered crop.
  • Telegram failure → still posts to Discord.
  • Discord failure → still posts to Telegram.

• 💸 Zero Infrastructure Cost

  • Runs entirely on GitHub Actions' free scheduled workflows.
  • A fresh runner starts for roughly 30 seconds each day and shuts down automatically.

• 🔒 Privacy-Conscious

  • Student records were minimized to only the required fields:
    • Name
    • Date of Birth
  • Removed unnecessary personal information such as phone numbers and email addresses.

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💡 Why it's interesting

• ✅ Completely serverless automation
• ✅ No hosting or maintenance costs
• ✅ Fault-tolerant workflow with graceful degradation
• ✅ Correct timezone handling for reliable scheduling
• ✅ Automated image generation pipeline
• ✅ Simultaneous multi-platform notifications
• ✅ Privacy-first data handling

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🛠️ Tech Stack

• Python
• OpenCV – Face detection
• Pillow (PIL) – Image compositing and flyer generation
• GitHub Actions – Free scheduled CI/CD automation
• Telegram Bot API
• Discord Webhooks