Hi, my name is Tala👋 , and I have always been so inspired by engineers and their ability to create something out of basically nothing. So one goal of mine was to be able to create something just like they do every day. Mind you, in no way am I experienced in programming; I actually find it quite intimidating (my background is business). However, I wanted to challenge myself and start off small by creating a Slack bot that can automatically send our “Weekly Wins” thread.
To get started, I wanted to familiarize myself with how creating a messaging bot works, whether it was for discord or slack. I watched a couple of youtube videos, and after a day, I felt like I got the gist of it. The next step was actually to start setting it up. I created a slack app and got all the configurations ready.
After that, I created a repl and started following the videos code. Making it on Replit made it so much easier because I didn’t have to worry about setting up the environment and installing any other stuff needed.
After I got the base of everything, the fun part came! This is where I got to play around with what message I wanted to send, when, and where. I will admit it was a bit of a struggle trying to get the “schedule” module to work how I wanted it to, but after a couple of days of brainstorming and help from the team, we realized the issue was timezone differences. After we adjusted that, it was a success!
With this slack bot, we now don’t have to worry about manually sending it every week, which is super helpful. I would also say creating a test environment was also very useful, so the main channel doesn’t get spammed.
Overall this was an enriching experience; although it was a small task, I’m still pleased to know I can now make a bot to automate simple tasks, and I hope to learn more things like this in the future!
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