DEV Community: Patrick Best

Leading Ethics Discussions at Work

Patrick Best — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 13:28:15 +0000

The Social Dilemma has brought a wave of attention to ethical concerns about social media, and the companies responsible.

Personally, watching the documentary led me to consider action in my own company. How have we talked about ethics before, and how should we talk about it moving forward? More specifically, I'd like to outline what we talked about, how we talked about, and how we can successfully talk about ethics again.

What We Talked About

Ethics Talks at Snagajob

At Snagajob, we have a standing weekly time slot (we call it a "Tech Talk") where anyone can present on any topic for the purpose of learning and/or discussion. While there have been a wide variety of topics, I previously moderated a discussion on Ethics in Tech at Snagajob. This was a presentation split into two topics (it was originally three, but we ran out of time working through the first two): "The Application Black Hole" and "Responsible Communication Monitoring".

How We Talked About It

The Application Black Hole

Presented by fellow engineer, David Koslow, The Application Black Hole references bugs in our system that result in job applications being lost before employers even see them. Big bugs are easy to justify, with a larger impact to finances and brand, but what about when we only lose an application or two a day? From a resourcing standpoint alone, this most likely wouldn't be worth our time, but those one or two applications have the potential to be life altering for someone. We don't have a financial lever to represent this, so how do we create the case for making sure these bugs can't be overlooked?

Responsible Communication Monitoring

Our second topic was presented by Candace Nicolls, our Senior Vice President of People and Workplace. Like many software products in the industry, we collect and monitor NPS on our applications. These inputs also have a free text portion, where scorers can input their thoughts and feedback.

We had a scenario where a job seeker wrote suicidal thoughts into the NPS feedback box and submitted it to our team.

This discussion was a long one, and we ended up trying to tackle questions like: What is our responsibility when this happens? Should we change how we think about free text inputs on our site, is this happening somewhere else? What do other products do with suicidal language? How should we think about our communication channels as they evolve over time to handle this?

How We Can Talk About It Again

Takeaways

One of the most encouraging things about our discussion was the energy for change it created. I had a large number of folks contact me after our discussion (from individual contributors up to directors) about how we work to solve some of things we talked about, or other ideas they had about Snagajob and ethics in general.

I think my largest failure so far has been to not harness that enthusiasm into specific outcomes that we can achieve. What can we do about any outstanding job application bugs? How should we modify our communication channels to understand if someone we're communicating with is in danger?

In the interest of running another one of these discussions, I've broken down important points into a few categories:

Planning

Solicit attendance from as many perspectives as possible. Get different departments, different contributor levels, different genders, different races, different philosophies, different everything. The more perspectives you can bring to the discussion, the more everyone benefits from it.
Talk to your fellow employees about potential topics ahead of time. You'll likely find that there are a number of people passionate about a variety of topics. Encourage those passionate about a topic to present their ideas to the group.

Format

Death by PowerPoint is not the way to go on this one (or in any presentation really). Slides can be helpful, but keep them concise and focus on discussion.
Use a moderator to help keep conversation on topic and on time. This individual can also be very helpful in starting discussions if your group is a little shy. Have the moderator work with the presenter(s) beforehand so they can prepare questions to assist discussion if needed.

Content

Relate topics back to the work at your company. Connect concerns to the day to day work of your peers.
If you are going to dive into a sensitive topic, warn before the meeting starts and as the meeting is starting. For those that are not comfortable talking about a topic, there shouldn't be a surprise.

Outcomes

The discussion may veer towards "What can we do about this?". This is great, and is a starting point for action. Depending on the resources and focus of your company, come out with action items. Is there a related cause you can donate time or money to? Is there a way to modify your product to support your intent? Are others in your industry doing something about it, should they be?
If discussions like these are rare or new to your group, a good goal is getting others to begin incorporating ethical considerations into their own development or work process. If more people think about holistic impacts of their work, you'll hopefully start having these discussions as part of your grooming exercises.

Discuss

Have you talked about ethical concerns at your company before? What has been successful for you? What hasn't? What barriers have prevented you from having discussions like these successfully? I'd love to know more about how others have approached these discussions in their workplaces.

LoL Summoner Lookup by SMS

Patrick Best — Sat, 12 Sep 2020 15:09:20 +0000

I enjoy the occasional game of League of Legends.

As such, I've often thought about playing with the Riot Games API to create something fun and interesting. I eventually settled on this very simple SMS bot that accepts a summoner name via Text, and returns information about that summoner. It's a great beginner project if you're trying to learn the basics of:

Twilio programmable SMS
Twilio functions
Node / Javascript
Riot Games API usage

Without further ado, let's begin!

Riot Games API Key

First, let's get set up with a Riot Games API key. Here's how to get started with Riot's Developer Portal, for this project you can use the temporary key to test and develop until your application is approved.

Hold on to that key, and now we'll move over to Twilio, which will power our SMS and lookup logic.

Twilio Function

We're going to use a Twilio Function to power the logic behind our SMS bot, so lets work on that first.

If you haven't set up a Twilio account before, you can use my referral link here! (Non referral link)

Either create a new service, or use an existing one under Twilio functions (if you're not sure, just create a new one for now).

Once your service is ready, we'll create a few environment variables. Specifically:

Riot_Base_Url: Use this to store the base url for our Riot Requests. This will be determined by the region you want to lookup summoners against. For North America (NA1), this would be https://na1.api.riotgames.com.
Riot_Api_Key: Use this to store the API key you received from Riot Games.
Riot_Champion_Pool_Url: Use this to store the Data Dragon url from Riot. We use this to retrieve static champion information.

Nicely done! One last thing before we get to the code! Go to the dependencies section of your function service, and add axios version 0.20.0 as a dependency.

On to the code! Using the Add button, create a new blank function in your service (name it however you please). Paste in the following code chunk:

const axios = require('axios');

exports.handler = function(context, event, callback) {
  /* Assemble vars */
  const { Body } = event;
  const summonerName = Body;
  const championPoolUrl = context.Riot_Champion_Pool_Url;
  const summonerGetUrl = context.Riot_Base_Url + '/lol/summoner/v4/summoners/by-name/' + summonerName + "?api_key=" + context.Riot_Api_Key;

  /* Set up inital axios HTTP promises */
  // Retrieves static champion information from Data Dragon
  let championsPromise = 
    axios
      .get(championPoolUrl)
      .catch((error) => logErrorAndReturn(error, callback));

  // Retrieves summoner information
  let summonerPromise = 
    axios
      .get(summonerGetUrl)
      .catch((error) => {
        if(error.response.status == 404)
          handleSummonerNotFound(summonerName, callback)
        else
          logErrorAndReturn(error, callback)
      });

  /* Promise Logic */
  Promise
    .all([championsPromise, summonerPromise])
    .then((responses) => {
      /* Parse out responses */
      let championsResponse = responses[0];
      let summonerResponse = responses[1];
      let champions = championsResponse.data.data;

      /* Successful summoner lookup */
      if (summonerResponse.status == 200)
      {
        handleSummonerFound(summonerName, summonerResponse.data.summonerLevel, summonerResponse.data.id, champions, context, callback);
      }
      /* Other status code */
      else
      {
        logErrorAndReturn("Whoops! Looks like an issue communicating with Riot! Please try again later.", callback);
      }
    })
};

/* Matches champion Id from the Masteries information to the static information from DataDragon to get the champion name */
function getTopChampionName(champions, topChampionId) {
  for(const prop in champions)
  {
    if(champions[prop] != null && 
      champions[prop] !== 'undefined' && 
      champions[prop].key.toString() == topChampionId.toString())
    {
      return champions[prop].id;
    }
  }
}

/* Assembles the text response with releveant summoner and champion mastery information */
function handleSummonerFound(summonerName, summonerLevel, summonerId, champions, context, callback){
  /* Variable Set Up */
  const masteriesBaseUrl = context.Riot_Base_Url + '/lol/champion-mastery/v4/champion-masteries/by-summoner/' + summonerId + '?api_key=' + context.Riot_Api_Key;
  let message = "Summoner " + summonerName + " found. " + summonerName + " is level " + summonerLevel + ". ";
  let twiml = new Twilio.twiml.MessagingResponse()

  console.log("Summoner found!");

  axios
    .get(masteriesBaseUrl)
    .then((masteryResponse) => {
      let topChampionId = masteryResponse.data[0].championId;
      let topChampionPoints = masteryResponse.data[0].championPoints;
      let topChampion = getTopChampionName(champions, topChampionId);
      message += summonerName + "'s champion with the highest points is " + topChampion + ", at " + topChampionPoints + " points!";
      twiml.message(message);
      completeCallback(twiml, callback);
    })
    .catch((error) => {
      logErrorAndReturn(error, callback);
    })
}

/* Handles no summoner found cleanly */
function handleSummonerNotFound(summonerName, callback) {
  let twiml = new Twilio.twiml.MessagingResponse()
  twiml.message("Summoner " + summonerName + " was not found.")
  console.log("Summoner not found.");
  completeCallback(twiml, callback);
}

/* Generic error and log catching function */
function logErrorAndReturn(error, callback) {
  console.log(error);
  callback(error, null);
}

/* Generic callback completion function */
function completeCallback(twiml, callback){
  callback(null, twiml)
}

Save, and deploy your function.

Twilio Number Purchase

Almost there! Now that our function is set up and ready to go, we need to attach it to a phone number. Go to the phone numbers module in Twilio, and purchase as new number. You can also use an existing number, assuming it has no other current uses.

Select your desired number, and give it a nice friendly name so we know what it does at first glance (League Bot or Summoner Bot, perhaps).

Moving down to the Messaging section, we want to trigger our function when a message comes in. Under "A Message Comes In", select "Function", then select the service you created for your LoL bot. Select the appropriate environment, and then select the path that your function is defined under (you would have set this when you first created the function).

Hit save, and then boom! You have a working summoner name check bot! Try texting your new number with a LoL summoner name and see what happens!

Troubleshooting

If you aren't having luck with this bot, try some of the following:

Ensure you're using the right region base url from Riot
Ensure your Riot Games API key is correct and has not expired
Try enabling live debugging for your twilio function, and console log out any trouble spots in the code execution
Use Twilio's debugger tool to trace back where an issue is occurring