NaBoMaMo 2016 writeup

by Etienne Millon on February 1, 2017

Tagged as: ocaml, nabomamo, slack, bot.

Hello! It’s 2016, it’s November, and apparently it rhymes with #NaBoMaMo 2016, the National Bot Making Month. I made a bot!.

Full disclosure: it’s actually 2017, but I started writing this in 2016 so it’s OK. Also I’m not actually from the US, but I’ll relax the definition a bit and let’s pretend it means International Bot Making Year. Close enough!

Bots are all the rage - Twitter bots, IRC bots, Telegram bots… I decided to make a Slack bot to get more familiar with that API.

I wanted this to be a small project - write and forget, basically. I started by defining some specs and lock those down:

• that bot works on Slack
• it uses the “will it rain in the next hour” API from Météo France.
• the bot understands 3 commands:
  • tell you whether it will rain or not.
  • show you a graph of rain level over the next hour.
  • tell you when to go out to avoid the rain.

The next step was choosing the tech stack. For hosting itself I was sold on using Heroku from previous projects (or another PaaS host, for what it’s worth)

As for the programming language itself, I hesitated between three choices:

1. focus on the all-included experience: something that has libraries, tooling, but somehow boring;
2. focus on the shipping experience: stuff that I use daily, but looking to get something online quickly;
3. focus on learning something new.

The first one means something like Python or Ruby. I am familiar with the languages and am pretty sure that there are libraries that can take care of the Slack API without me having to ever worry about HTTP endpoints. That means also first-class deployment and hosting.

The second one is about OCaml: it’s a programming language I use daily at work, but the real goal would be to focus on shipping: create a project, write tests, write implementation, deploy, repeat for new features, forget.

The third one means a totally new programming language. I heard a lot of good things about Elixir for backend applications and figured that it would be a good intro project. Learning a new language is always an interesting experience, because it makes you a better programmer in all languages, and having clear specs would make this manageable.

The Python/Ruby solution seemed a bit boring. I probably would not learn a lot, only, maybe add a couple libraries to my toolbelt at most.

Elixir sounds great, but learning a new language and a new project at the same time is too hard and too time consuming. I would rather write in a new language something I previously wrote in another language. Though for something small and focused like this, that could have worked.

I first created the project structure: github repo, ocaml project (topkg, opam, etc). I like to use TDD for this kind of projects, so I added a small alcotest suite. I also created the 12factor separation: a Procfile, a small bin/ shell that reads the application configuration from the environment and starts a bot from lib/.

I asked myself what to test: the cohttp library is nice, because servers and clients are built using normal functions that take a request and returns a response. That makes it possible to test almost everything at the ocaml level without having to go to the HTTP level. This is especially important since there is no way to mock values and functions in ocaml. Everything has to be real objects.

However, even if it was possible to test everything, I decided to just focus on the domain logic without testing the HTTP part: for example, I would pass data structures directly to my bot object rather than building a cohttp request.

A part that is important for me even for a small project like that, is to have some sort of CI: have travis run my test suite, and make a binary ready to be deployed to Heroku. That way, it is impossible to forget how to make changes, test and deploy, since this is all in a script.

The other part that needed work is the actual Slack integration. The “slash” command API is pretty simple: it is possible to configure a Slack team such that typing /rain will hit a particular URL. Some options are passed as POST data and whatever is returned is displayed in Slack.

I set up the Slack integration, wrote a function to distinguish between /rain and /rain list (using the POST data), and by the end of the second iteraton I had my second feature implemented, working, and deployed.

All in all, that was pretty great. The code or the bot itself are not particularly fantastic, but I learned some important lessons:

• When you do not want to spend a lot of time on a task, invest in planning and keep the list of features short. That is pretty obvious in the context of paid work, but this is applies well to hobby programming too.
• Know what to test and what not to. Tests are useful to ensure that changes can be made without breaking everything, but testing that your HTTP library can parse POST data is a waste of time.
• In languages where it is not possible to mock or monkey patch functions, dependency injection is still possible. One may even argue that it leads to a better solution, since it removes the coupling between the different components.

You can find the source of this bot on Github. See you next year, #NaBoMaMo! And thanks to Tully Hansen for organizing this.