Ship #1 Pending review

@Greg_ios on RandomBot · about 2 hours ago

RandomBot is a simple Slack bot that manages a list of people and can randomly pick someone from it.
You can add people, view the list, randomly pick a person, clear the list, and see all available commands directly from Slack.
The bot is built with JavaScript, Node.js, Slack Bolt and Socket Mode. The list is saved locally in a JSON file so it can stay between restarts.

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@Greg_ios on RandomBot · about 2 hours ago

15m 34s logged

Today I wrapped up the development of RandomBot for the Hack Club Stardance Slack Bot mission! The bot is fully finished, tested, and running live.

What got finished in v1.0.0:

Deployment on Nest: Deployed the bot to the Nest server using systemd (slackbot.service) so it runs 24/7 in the background.
Production Setup: Configured server-side environment variables (.env) for Slack tokens and verified process logging via journalctl.
Repo Polish: Cleaned up the repository with a minimal README.md, LICENSE (MIT), CHANGELOG.md, .env.example, and .gitignore.
Persistence: Verified that local state persistence (people.json) works seamlessly across process restarts.

Key Learnings:
Building this project step-by-step taught me a lot about Node.js array manipulation, handling the local filesystem (fs), managing JSON data, Slack’s @slack/bolt framework with Socket Mode, and setting up persistent Linux services on Nest.

The project is officially shipped and ready to use! 🚀

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@Greg_ios on RandomBot · 1 day ago

45m 38s logged

RandomBot — Devlog

Today I started building my first Slack bot for the Hack Club Stardance Slack Bot mission.

The idea is pretty simple. I wanted to make something where you can add people to a list and then let the bot randomly pick someone.

What it can do so far

/randombot-add [name] — adds someone to the list
/randombot-list — shows everyone in the list
/randombot-pick — randomly picks someone
/randombot-clear — clears the list
/randombot-help — shows the available commands

I’m using a small people.json file to save the list. The bot creates it automatically if it doesn’t exist, and I added it to .gitignore so the list won’t be uploaded to GitHub.

I’m building everything step by step instead of trying to make the whole thing at once. So far I’ve learned more about arrays, fs, JSON and how Slack slash commands work.

Next I want to test everything in Slack and continue improving the bot.