day 1 on my stardance slack bot. started by reading through the whole guide so i knew what i was building - a slack bot that answers slash commands. first thing i actually set up was builting the bot itself - a node project using slack bolt in socket mode, so it talks to slack over a websocket and doesn’t need a public url. wrote four slash commands: /sripin-ping replies with the bot’s latency, /sripin-help lists the commands, and /sripin-catfact and /sripin-joke pull from public apis with axios and have try/catch so a dead api doesn’t crash the bot. also added a tiny http health endpoint on port 3000 so there’s still something to open in a browser, plus a systemd service file for deploying on nest later. set up the git repo, wrote the readme, and pushed everything to github. next up: make the actual slack app, get the xoxb + xapp tokens into .env, run npm install, and test it live in #bot-spam.