Setting up Hubot with a gTalk account for fun
This article should be called like something like “Be happy: put a robot in your life”, deep down in order to represent better what I will explain here I’ve changed the title to a more technical point of view.
Since I’ve started to work in Openhost I always thought that for creating a good product our developers (and me between them) should have a great atmosphere, in order to do that I would rather have a pleasant workflow than a strict one. So I’m a firmly believer of Gamification of work. We were using Jenkins for doing Continuous integration and quickly integrated the Jenkins Continuous Integration Game, a tool which allowed us to create contests for improving our code base without even thinking about it, just thinking on getting a high rate in the contests. But, this is something to another post.
As we are continuously telecommuting, we use groupware chats as our main way of communication. This week I came across to something called Hubot, it’s some sort of chat bot with incredible scriptable capabilities. In a brief description, it is a program that can connect to your groupware chat and it can accept orders, run them in the server and get some response to them in return.