Bubbles VS blossom

Working with new modmail with PRAW is... painful. I built this script for our mod slack that just checks for unread messages and it works probably 95% of the time? Occasionally the headers are backwards and I just haven't had the gumption to fix it for how little it happens. https://github.com/GrafeasGroup/Bubbles/blob/main/bubbles/commands/modmail.py

So I started working on a bot that would live in modchat, able to help us with whatever we needed and something that could be extended in the future. (For those interested in the tech side of things, we originally started by building on the errbot platform before eventually building a brand new system from scratch that better fit our needs.) As we built, we needed a name for the new bot; a few different names got thrown around, but we eventually settled on Bubbles.

Enter Bubbles, our modchat chatbot. Bubbles originally started as a system for doing more complex reminders before morphing into a truly indispensable tool for our team. Among other things, Bubbles directly controls all of the other bots on the server, including herself. Let's say that we push a new feature to GitHub for Blossom -- something that happens fairly regularly -- in the Before Times, we would have to SSH into the server and run a small laundry list of commands just to get the deployment to finish. Instead, we merge in the new code on GitHub and ask Bubbles to handle the process for us directly in Slack.

We did something similar, but doesn't have the permissions checking that your does (and ours is much simpler to deploy -- and it can update itself!) https://github.com/grafeasGroup/bubbles-v2

When looking at the API, the way we get all of the information we need, we have access to a fairly large amount of information. The Developer Platform, while it has its uses, is not designed with large and busy bots in mind. It's much better suited for entry-level 'learning to code' style bots that we see frequently pop up on the site. Issues from data usage limits, data storage limits (500kb! Our database in Blossom is over 1.4GB), connecting to services outside reddit (which we have gotten special permissions for, I'll give them that), and more plague the development experience at the time of this writing.

u/goldieczr here's the repo for our primary site, data storage, and API. Python / Django. https://github.com/grafeasGroup/blossom

Really, there was only one choice, and Blossom was brought to life. As the leader of the trio, it just made sense.

In software development, tooling refers to programs or scripts that only serve to maintain other programs or scripts. In our case, we write tooling for the QA and Engagment teams so that they can directly interact with the keeper of data, Blossom, or various spreadsheets that are used to keep track of different things (like the delightfully awesome Treasure Hunts in Discord).