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Devlog #1: Building Simple Slackyyy Botty
Hey everyone! I’ve been working on a Slack bot for the Hack Club workspace, and I wanted to share how it’s coming along. Meet Simple Slackyyy Botty — a bot that started as a basic ping-check and has grown into a little assistant with six commands.
THE COMMANDS SO FAR
/simple-slackyyy-botty-ping — the simplest one. Just checks how fast the bot responds, useful for making sure everything’s alive and working.
/simple-slackyyy-botty-catfact — pulls a random cat fact from a public API (catfact.ninja) and posts it. Small, silly, but a good first “real” feature since it taught me how to fetch data from outside APIs.
/simple-slackyyy-botty-joke — same idea, but for jokes, pulling from the official-joke-api. This one needed a different HTTP library (axios) than the cat facts did, which was a good lesson in how there’s more than one way to make a web request in Node.js.
/simple-slackyyy-botty-weather [city name] — this one leveled up a lot. It started as a fixed-location weather check, but now you can type any city and it’ll geocode the name into coordinates, then fetch live weather for it — including things like temperature, air quality, and UV index. It also posts publicly in the channel instead of just to me, so everyone can see it.
/simple-slackyyy-botty-birthday [MM-DD] — probably the feature I’m proudest of. You save your birthday, and the bot remembers it — not in a temporary file, but in an actual SQLite database using better-sqlite3. Every day at 9 AM, it checks the database and posts a birthday shoutout for anyone whose day it is, tagging them directly in the channel.
/simple-slackyyy-botty-quiz — the newest addition, letting people pick a subject, difficulty, and number of questions to test their knowledge.
WHAT I LEARNED
- How to call external APIs and handle their responses
- The difference between file-based storage (JSON) and a real database (SQLite), and why the database is more reliable
- How scheduled tasks work (cron jobs) to make the bot do things automatically, not just respond to commands
- A lot of patience debugging — copy-pasting code in the wrong spot, duplicate lines, and other small mistakes that taught me to read my code more carefully before running it
WHAT’S NEXT
- Get the bot running 24/7 instead of just on my own machine
- Push the whole project to GitHub
- Keep polishing the help command and maybe add a few more fun commands
That’s it for devlog #1 — more updates soon as I keep building!
