When your team is out of the games, you have to kill the time somehow. Alas, Italy is not taking part in the World Cup 2018 tournament. As an Italian which follows football only when the national team is playing, this is a nightmare becoming real. Since I was a child, I waited for the World Cup to come every 4 years to support Italy and losing my voice screaming at every goal. Not having to follow the matches, though, gave me some spare time. And if I can’t participate to this event as a supported, I still can do it as a developer. global That’s why I came up with the idea of creating a Slack Bot for the World Cup 2018. To spice up the task a bit, I decided to give me 24h only and see what I could come up with. The goal (pun intended) of the bot was simple. It had to be able to . In particular, about start, end and half times, goals, yellow and red cards, substitutions. notify on a Slack channel about details of every current match You can see the result of my small experiment . You can easily clone and install it on your own Slack account. here In the rest of the post, I’ll explain how the bot was designed and developed. The base idea The bot is a simple Go application that does the following: fetches information about today matches from (thank you, ) worldcup.sfg.io Eric S figures out if there’s a live match; figures out what happened in the live match since the last time we fetched; extracts the latest match highlights; shouts the highlights in Slack. The application is dockerized for an ready-to-go development experience and the compilation of the executable. . Make + Docker is a killer combination for an easy yet powerful automation of your development tasks The application is also configurable in terms of polling time, bot appearance and slack channel. The application design The design of the bot revolves around 3 main components: Scheduling Slack Bot World Cup domain model Each of the components is reflected in its own Go package. Scheduling When the application is started, a Scheduler is created to take control of the operations. At a configurable interval, the Scheduler executes the following steps: get the current match get the latest highlights of the current match send those highlights to the slack bot Slack Bot The Slack bot is a very simple abstraction over the amazing golang Slack API. It has a single method to send a message to the channel configured at construction time. Say(something string) World Cup domain model All the definitions of teams, matches, events and highlights belongs here. It also defines the for fetching the current match. Under the hood, the repository is calling the /today API and figures out whether there’s a live match ongoing. repository worldcup.sfg.io Conclusion It always amazes me how easy and fast you can build and deploy a backend application with Go. As an example, I find a very elegant one-liner solution for implementing a ticking mechanism. <-time.After(duration) The 24h constraint was an effective method that prevented me from adding feature after feature upfront and never release something functional. I must say I had a lot of fun building this bot. Nevertheless, my hope is that 4 years from now I’ll be able to spend time supporting my national team rather than building another World Cup bot again :-) Ready to become a better developer? I’ve created a for you. Download it for free and start how to write code you will be proud of. If you constantly apply those techniques, you’ll become a top software developer. developer toolkit learning Get the free developer toolkit ! here If you enjoyed this post, please click the 👏 button and share to help others find it! Feel free to leave a comment below. You can also subscribe to my Software Development newsletter here: http://eepurl.com/dfQQaz

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I built a World Cup 2018 Slack Bot in 24h

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