This happens a lot, you have a ton of awesome coworkers, they all keep sharing awesome articles, you have no idea how they find the time to read and work, but they do it anyways, you have tons of content sitting around in slack, but your social networks are dead.
There are a number of problems related to that:
We felt it would be useful to allow anyone on our slack channels to take advantage of that sharing content via our social media accounts in the most frictionless way possible.
Everyone is doing bots nowadays, so we went ahead and built a bot that makes it dead simple to do these posts — simply react to the slack message with a custom emoji and the bot posts the content!
How did we built it
We based our bot on Scalac bot-core library, but there are lots of awesome libraries out there if you r interested to build your own.
One of most challenging part of this bot was to get reactions, most of slack integrations will use the Real Time Messaging protocol API and that will allow you to receive and respond to text messages, so reactions was a bit more complicated, but Scalac bot core allowed us to override their receive method so we could accomplish what we needed
So after we received a reaction, we need to start a conversation with the slack account reacting, so we used akka actors become/unbecome feature to have a tiny state machine and be able to confirm or dismiss that message.
We have being running this bot for about a year now, and it took some work to get it where it is now, asking confirmation, letting us know how the post would look like and such.
We have started to add more stuff, like Facebook integration, bitly integration to track links posted, and probably more will come in the future!
If you’d like to add this to your slack account, we will open source the bot code to our github account soon.
