We are open-sourcing a silly Slack bot, guess what it does!

At JoliCode we use Slack to communicate. And to bring fun to our daily life, we have created a #monologue channel where we can share our thoughts, our feelings, our dreams, our fears, our jokes, our memes, our pictures, our videos, our music, our links, our code, our life. But we have a special rule in this channel.

Only one person can use this channel per day. The others cannot: no message, no reaction, no changing the topic, no message deleting, no poll. The pledge is to offer breakfast 🍪🍩🥐.

But it was hard to remember who failed and had to give us breakfast! Because sometimes, some of us were able to trick so many people in one day 🎉.

So 3 years ago we built a very small app to keep track of all our debts! 💸

This bot is here to help us respect this rule. It will post a message in the channel as soon as someone breaks the rule!

Section intitulée open-source-timeOpen Source Time!

Today, we are happy to announce we have open-sourced our bot ✨🎇🎆✨

It’s a traditional Symfony application, that runs with:

• Symfony 6.2
• PHP 8.1
• PostgreSQL 15.1

Section intitulée how-does-it-workHow does it work?

The application listens for webhook coming from Slack. It receives all messages from a specific channel, to know who is the first to acquire the channel, and who will fail.

It features:

• an action to mark a debt as paid;
• some commands:
  • /monologue: to get the list of all pending debts;
  • /amnesty: to ask for a general amnesty a certain number of members (5) need to ask for one, on the same day.

Section intitulée conclusionConclusion

It’s a very small project that fits our needs. We guess it won’t evolve very much, but if you find a typo or have a nice idea to improve the project, we’ll be happy to merge your pull request.

But we encourage you to install this bot in your company, it’s quite simple and we provide a manifest to ease the configuration of the slack application.

Finally, this application helps users increase security, because a malicious colleague will very often post in #monologue on your behalf if you keep your computer session open to the public…