ryanwold.net - Civic Tech, Bitcoin, and Open Government Innovation

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Last Friday, in a @neoinnovate Slack channel, Principal, Michele Perras, encouraged us to build our own Slack bots.  The thought of a Slack bot lingered over the weekend. I just spent ~3-days last week at the Code for America summit in Oakland, CA.

On Saturday morning, while having coffee, I decided to give the [Slack API](https://api.slack.com/) a try. I quickly found the [slack-ruby-client](https://github.com/dblock/slack-ruby-client) .gem.  Using the .gem, I was able to get to a working example [pretty quickly](https://twitter.com/randw/status/650388283063570432) - able to post a test message to a Slack channel from a Ruby prompt. Oh, the possibilities!

How about Slack + [Code for America's API](http://codeforamerica.org/api/)? I wrote a basic service using the Slack bot, as an exercise with CfA's API and the [Heroku 1-click Deploy button](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-button).

The exploration resulted in [civic-bot](https://github.com/afomi/civic-bot).

The bot supports a few commands so far, and it retrieves data from Code for America's open API. In this case, we enter a Slack command, like `dot cfa:issues`, and that triggers a query to an external API based, and the result is displayed back in the Slack channel.

This proof-of-concept enables behavior-of-our-choosing based on specific string sequences in a Slack channel.  The bot service is 1-click deployable to Heroku and runs as a worker. Just specify the Slack Bot's token when creating the service.

### Takeaways

* Slack's API is extra-easy to use
* Programming bots is a challenging exercise in minimalist, functional design

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#### Update: Code Snips

* [Where message patterns are defined and responded to](https://github.com/afomi/civic-bot/blob/master/bot.rb)
* [Where actions are defined](https://github.com/afomi/civic-bot/blob/master/slack/helper.rb)
* [Where implementation details are stuffed for now](https://github.com/afomi/civic-bot/blob/master/slack/helper_text.rb)

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Do you have any favorite Slack bots? Anything you'd love to see a Slack bot do? Share your thoughts below!

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