Bubbles VS utonium

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

As we continue to grow, I'm sure that we'll eventually need to add more services to fulfill needs that we don't yet have. And when that day comes... we'll see who joins us next 😉 I hope you've enjoyed this dive into a bit of our weirder history -- if you have any questions, feel free to ask!