Building a Karma Bot with Python and the Slack API

We love Slack! But what if we can make it even cooler? Imagine: you are geeking out with your fellow developers on Slack and you want to give them credit. Or you can write “stupidsubject–” and it automagically shows “stupidsubject’s karma decreased to -2”. Enter Karma Bot. This is nothing new but building one myself was a great learning exercise and a fun tool we use on our Slack now.

Parsing Twitter Geo Data and Mocking API Calls by Example

“Is this Bob or Julian?!” … yeah tweeting from our shared @pybites Twitter account can be confusing! So I made a little script to parse the location of our tweets. Then I extended it to make it testable. I wrote a decorator to cache a couple of API outputs to be used with the unittest.mock patch decorator I learned about. A simple script turned into a good learning exercise.