ULOG #11: Developing the Ulog-Bot

One of the quotes by Terry that stuck with me is his reply to the question "how to be like you?"

To become like me, you will have to stubbornly become the awesomest version of "YOU".

And that's where ulogs came forth.

Personally, I believe one of the hardest things in life is bringing out the best in people and I appreciate anyone who tries. This development contribution is an attempt to give back to Terry - to realize his ideas into fruition.

Repository

https://github.com/surpassinggoogle/ulog-communties

Task Request

https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@surpassinggoogle/task-request-help-us-develop-a-summon-bot-that-can-vote-and-comment-on-authors-designed-to-run-ulog-communities-and-ulog-subtags

Pull Requests

Implementation

1. https://github.com/surpassinggoogle/ulog-communties/pull/1 - the base codes. It didn't have all the functions needed, just enough to have it comment on a post and include all the checks specified in the task request.
2. https://github.com/surpassinggoogle/ulog-communties/pull/4 - instead of getting the certified uloggers from the config file, I opted to get them from @uloggers's following
3. https://github.com/surpassinggoogle/ulog-communties/pull/5 - added the voting function and refactored some variable names to make the code more readable.

Refactors

1. https://github.com/surpassinggoogle/ulog-communties/pull/2/files - due to the limited RC of my test account, the comment function was disabled in PR #1. This PR just enabled the comment function for Terry to be able to test it in his production environment. As what can be seen in the history of commits, I struggled with making the codes deployable to Heroku. This was the first time I developed in Typescript, and from hindsight, I think it would have been better if I used normal Javascript.
2. https://github.com/surpassinggoogle/ulog-communties/pull/3 - as I tested the codes in my staging environment, some config variables felt better defined as environment variables. That's what this PR included.

Feature in Action

https://ulogs.org/@east.autovote/ulog-testing-ulog-bot

Lesson Learned

Developing this bot was something new for me. There were two main motivators for me to take this task:

1. the bounty that came with it, and
2. the opportunity to build a bot that I've been planning to study ever since I became part of #blockchainbi

One of the struggles I had was making the base codes work with Heroku. I'm not familiar with Typescript and I didn't know that the codes needed to be built to convert the *.ts files to *.js and then start the app using these generated .js in Heroku's worker procfile.

Struggles come with learning.

GitHub Account

https://github.com/eastmaels