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! 🚀