
Building Slack Bots for Fun: A Serverless Release Gong - fugazithehaxoar
https://www.stackery.io/blog/serverless-gong/
======
rvanmil
Slack bots are fun and pretty easy to build! We're running one on an rpi at
the office which monitors our #travis channel for failed builds and then
powers a revolving light for a couple seconds :)

Small nitpick, the author should've used the `@slack/client` package though,
`slack-node` is old and unmaintained.

~~~
finaliteration
Nice! I built something similar for AWS CodeBuild and ECS where we get channel
notifications when builds start/succeed/fail and when ECS tasks start or die.
It also shows who made the commit and what it relates to by pulling info from
GitHub. I haven’t gone the flashing light route quite yet but I’ve considered
it.

Or maybe a loud noise directed at the developer who submitted the commit that
caused the build to fail.

~~~
dewey
Just what people need, more physical distractions in the office!

------
cjsaylor
I've also created a slack bot for fun to allow slack teammates to play chess
within slack:
[https://github.com/cjsaylor/chessbot](https://github.com/cjsaylor/chessbot).
The bot I built is a more traditional server setup, however I did briefly
consider using a serverless setup for it.

The serverless pipeline seems a lot more complex than the actual application
to send the message to a slack channel. I wonder if things like Github's
actions would replace the need to have a serverless thing for notifications of
this kind (at least within the confines of Github's ecosystem).

~~~
tptacek
That's funny, I built the same thing for our Slack (I wish I'd known about
notnil/chess; I tediously wrote out the rules for chess). I managed to do
without assets, though, except for a typeface that had chess piece glyphs. :)

~~~
cjsaylor
I first started down the text path, but not being able to "highlight" previous
plays and check turned me towards generating graphics instead.

~~~
tptacek
Oh, it's not text; I render a PNG too. I just use the glyphs from the typeface
for the pieces, and draw the board in code.

~~~
cjsaylor
I think I tried the same thing, but shipping with the font included presented
some licensing concerns. Also, I had a hard time getting it to line up exactly
how I wanted, so ultimately I went on to assets.

