Lockbot

Today at 16:30 I got a nice surprise when Lockbot was mentioned in the #kudos Slack channel at work by a random colleague who was using Lockbot in a team that I hadn't told about Lockbot.

It's a great sign that word have mouth has got people using Lockbot in different teams. I was actually expecting the release to be a complete fail and that no one will use it.

It's only been a few days so who knows if people will continue to use it but it's been a cool experience regardless! Let's see what happens.

I've been spending the past couple of weeks getting Lockbot into a nice enough state to release into my first real life test: My work's Slack workspace 🚀

I spent quite a lot of time rewriting the Lockbot messaging and documentation to make sure that the purpose and usage of Lockbot was at least obvious to my work colleagues. It was something that I had been putting off for a while but I think it has paid off.

I crafted a nice message in my team's Slack channel and hit send. The response was great, my team started using it immediately. And there was interest, ideas and feedback from other teams too, fabulous!

Anyone who's created a public repository on GitHub in the hope of sharing it and it being useful to others knows that it can be a bit tricky to get traction on your repository. It's nice when your friends "Star your project" to show support. But it's much more encouraging when random strangers do it who are not under duress 😅

So it was a pleasant surprise when two Slack employees became Stargazers. I DM'd them on Twitter to thank them and they both replied saying nice things about the project which was great!

My friend Mike has kindly created a logo for Lockbot to bring it to life. I can finally launch the lockbot.app website, update the README and get rid of the pesky default Slack bot profile picture.

Midway through creating a basic website I had an idea to make it a bit more fun and turn it into an interactive web app demo. I probably wasted quite a lot of time getting this to work but I enjoyed it and it's cool! You can test Lockbot without even installing it. Don't think many other Slack bots offer this.

I've spent the past few weeks building Lockbot on evenings and weekends. It feels good to make progress and see it come to life.

The fundamentals of the bot have been built and Lockbot has been deployed to AWS and is now running live on the interwebs!

It's not perfect but it works. One day I'll test this with people at work.

It's been 5 days since I started thinking about building this Slack bot in the meantime I've been researching and thinking about different ways I could make it 🧠

I'm learning and using Typescript, AWS and Serverless framework at work, and with so many libraries for building bots and other things and the low cost of hosting serverless apps, it seems like the perfect toolset to build Lockbot.

It's Sunday, day of code, and instead of procrastinating and not doing anything I've made a start by creating the project and starting to write the core app behaviour using TDD and pushing the code to GitHub.

I started a new developer job last month. I've finished coding something and I want to deploy it to a dev environment. But what if someone's using dev? I don't want to trample on my new teammates deployment and mess with their testing! 😱

There must be an app to manage this in Slack?
I found that a Slack app does exist but it requires too many permissions that it shouldn't need to function.

I thought why not have a go at building it myself. It's a nicely sized problem - not too easy, not too hard! Even if it's just for fun and learning. Good opportunity to see something through end-to-end.

What else am I going to do with my free time during the Coronavirus lockdown? 🦠