Cyber3000
By
@Srikar1705
- 5 Devlogs
- 6 Total hours
A Slackbot that brings Y2K cyber-nostalgia
Ship #1
Pending review
Cyber3000 is a Slack bot made for people obsessed over the 2000s era or who are interested on knowing more about it. This bot brings back a wave of nostalgia and retro technology. Coded in Node.js using Slack’s Bolt Framework, also developed two API Endpoints as part of this project (data formatted in JSON).
Commands:
/cyber3000-y2ktech - Gives a piece of info about iconic tech devices from the 2000s era.
/cyber3000-nostalgia - Drops a nostalgic memory from the 1990s-2010s.
/cyber3000-seek - Gives a summary about the keyword entered.
/cyber3000-ascii - Converts the given text into ASCII Art and displays it.
/cyber3000-advice - Drops a random piece of advice.
/cyber3000-help and /cyber3000-ping - Basic commands
What I Learnt
Thanks to Stardance, I developed my first Slack bot in NodeJS. It was a great experience to express my interests and make a bot on it. Following the guide, writing the code, debugging, writing devlogs and good git commits was a really good journey. For a person like me, who’s very much interested in programming, I loved the idea of proper documentation for a project right from writing my first devlog to what I’m writing now. I learnt many things during the course of developing this bot, especially that coding is not the whole part and presentation is what makes your project the best!
Where I Struggled
Though this project being my first time writing the code for a Slackbot, I did not feel it to be very tough except for displaying the result from the API Endpoint as a response to the user on Slack, which returned [object Object] and [object Promise] multiple times but I soon learnt the reason behind it and solved it. I also didn’t know where know where to use async and await until my project came to an end.
Thanks,
Srikar.
39m 42s logged
Devlog 5 - Ephemeral??
- I have added all the commands to Cyber3000 which I wanted to and today is the day to run it 24/7 on Nest.
- I started seting up my bot on Nest from my command prompt, following the guide… And after I’ve done it, I opened Slack to try out my bot, just to get shocked that the responses were only visible to me!
- Throwback to 3 days ago, while testing my bot on Slack during the time of running my bot locally, I saw that all of it’s responses were ephemeral. I mistook that it was happening because I was running my bot locally.
- I had to add a line of code for every response in my code to fix it and I edited the index.js file from my command prompt itself using the command
nano index.js(Nano is CLI-based text editor) and restarted the container from Nest. - Now that everything is fixed, I’ve added the demo url to README.md on my Github Repo. Tested all the commands of my bot again and now I
thinkam sure that my project is ready to be shipped!
Do checkout the responses of the bot (it’s not ephemeral anymore!!) 👇🏻
1h 20m 4s logged
Devlog 4 - The ASCII Art
- I was tinkering with my project, wondering which feature to add next. That’s when the ASCII Art came into my mind…
- For those who don’t know, ASCII was a character encoding standard and ASCII Art was a graphic design technique which used the those characters for art which was widely used during the 80s.
- I had known this art for a while and for Cyber3000’s theme, I thought it would be very cool to add it.
- Also added a help command for the bot.
Do check out the ASCII Art below!
1h 39m 40s logged
Devlog 3 - My Own API Endpoint for Cyber3000
- Two days ago, I’ve just read the Hackclub guide on making a Slackbot which uses APIs to retrieve data such as a random cat image or a random joke.. And I found APIs interesting right from the start when I was trying to find a theme for making my Slack bot.
- I did some research on how basic API Endpoints work and how they retrieve and manage data formatted in JSON.
- Today, I started gathering a lot of information about 2000s tech and nostalgic memories of the 1990s-2010s(early) era and I have made two JSON files with the data from which my bot can retrieve the info and drop a random info. about 2000s tech or a nostalgic memory. Though I was not born in that era, I’m definitely very fond of it.
- I have added two commands for the above:
- /cyber3000-y2ktech
- /cyber3000-nostalgia
Below attached are their screenshots:
1h 31m 10s logged
Devlog 2 - The Seek Command
- Thought of adding a command which gives a summary of any keyword entered and went for the DuckDuckGO API.
- Struggled with catching the proper part I needed from the API and displaying it to the user. As the it returned a lot of information about the keyword(such as links and a lot of specifications related to it), I had to filter the result only to get the short summary.
- The bot was replying with [object Promise] until I realised that I’ve missed
awaitwhen calling the function. The silly part was I’ve entered = instead of===in anifstatement. - Sorted everything at the end!
The Seek Command! 👇🏻
43m 21s logged
Devlog 1 - The First Commit
- Started with setting up my bot on Slack API website and wrote the boilerplate code for the bot on VSC in Node.js. Thanks to the Hackclub guide on making a Slack bot, it made my work easy.
- Struggled with testing my bot on Slack channel until I realised that my ‘node index.js’ was not running on my Terminal.
- Added a ‘/cyber3000-advice’ command which fetches a random advice from the AdviceSlip API
- Lastly, committed everything into my Github Repo
The advice command:
