Let's Make a Chatbot in Ruby!

As developers, we have the power to craft the world we work in. Chatbots are one way that we smooth the path for our team, making some tedious things fun. This video combines two of my favorite things: team automation, and pairing with Avdi. I bet you will like them too.
— Jessica Kerr

Want to use your programming abilities to give your team superpowers?

Chatbots are the next level of development tooling. Instead of passive scripts and cron jobs, your automations can act as richly interactive and helpful members of your team.

Thinking of taking the plunge into into bot development? Let’s explore it together! Daniel Pritchett is the author of the book , and I’m Avdi Grimm, host of the renowned screencast series. Together in this video series, we’ll take you from first steps to plugging your first bot into Slack, using the framework.

In these six videos (totalling ~80 minutes of video), you’ll follow along as we:

• Install Lita and dependencies
• Discuss how Lita differs from Hubot
• Create a new bot and a new handler using generators
• Use the Lita console to debug handlers
• Use Pry to interactively explore Lita APIs
• Explore how Lita isolates handlers into their own Rubygems
• Practice test-driven chatbot development with RSpec
• Use advanced Ruby regex features to parse commands
• Connect and integrate a bot with Slack
• Trigger bot actions using the Lita HTTP API

No suspiciously-easy manufactured scenarios here—this is a footage of an honest and unrehearsed pair-programming session. We’ve edited out breaks, installation waits, and long pauses. But otherwise this is authentic programming, including whoopsies and head-scratching moments!

Ready to power-up your team with chatops? Join Daniel and I, and let’s make a chatbot in Ruby!