written on Saturday, September 25, 2010
This Saturday afternoon I had nothing (that I deemed) important to do, so I've decided to check how rusty I had became with Ruby. I've spent some fun hours coding a simple IRC bot to substitute the one that my team used at work since we've lost it's source code.
There's no technical reason for my decision of using Ruby instead of my current favorite programming language. I just wanted to practice with another language for a change, but wasn't with enough disposition to learn a new one. I also had to bear in mind that (if used), this would be installed on a production machine, so keeping the external dependencies limited would be a good idea [1].
Anyway, you can check it out here. I've included a basic README file with usage instructions. The fun part is over, so I don't plan on documenting nor creating help / debug output messages today.
Using it is pretty straight-forward if you're familiarized with cinch. If not, just check their homepage. The good thing is that I've done MachineBot (yeah, the name is lame, I agree) as a plugin, so if you already have your own bot built with cinch, integrating mine is just a matter of requiring it and adding to the plugin list.
I should really start doing this more often, it's a great exercise. Too bad weekends like this are hard to come by nowadays. I'll make sure to keep track of how much time I spend doing it next time - It's been around 4 hours, but I'd like to know precisely what's my pace.
| [1] | Actually, I hadn't thought of that while coding. This came to my mind while writing this post. |