Today I am proud to release my latest project — a website and the first ever DEV bot (as far as I know), called Daily Developer Jokes.
The Daily Developer Jokes bot will post programmer humor and jokes every day at 8:00 AM (EST), both on the Daily Developer Jokes Website, and on the Daily Developer Jokes DEV Profile.
Each joke comes with a custom Daily Developer Jokes banner on DEV, and an image with the joke overlayed on the top.
This is our first joke (from today):
You can check out the official, searchable list of daily developer jokes on the Daily Developer Jokes Website.
Daily Developer Jokes runs on a set of Python programs, Node.js server(s), and several PHP servers to generate posts, get jokes, generate images for jokes, and post the final markdown files to the site and DEV profile.
For posting to DEV, the Daily Developer Jokes bot uses the DEV API along with a cronjobs system written in Python, running 24/7 on a Raspberry Pi. As far as I know, the Daily Developer Jokes DEV account is the first ever DEV bot to use the DEV API to post daily.
Go check it out!
I may elaborate on the way I built this project and bot in the near future (and may open source it), and I hope you enjoyed this post and the project.
Thanks for scrolling.
— Gabriel Romualdo, January 12, 2020
Top comments (12)
From a technical standpoint, great work! This is awesome.
From a community moderator standpoint...ugh, do we really need someone to write a bot and share it with the world, incidentally making the spammer's jobs that much easier?
Then again, I think some of the spammers have already accomplished this, so that's moot. Shrug
Maybe we need DEV to have a official tag or identification system for bots, so it can be a notifications preference to squelch it.
Your point is valid. But it’s not like this isn’t providing content. It’s just doing it via a automated way. I have seen other bots that don’t offer value in the same way.
I'd like if we could make bots first class citizens, with a special classifications. Likely we'd want these bots to belong explicitely to users and/or orgs and they could do the same basic things, but would be classified in a special way.
I think the usefulness of bots for certain types of subscriptions, like I might want a bot that auto-creates a post for every issue in a repo for a side discussion or just to keep up with stuff going on.
Once we get this system underway we can migrate this bot there. Until that system is available, we'll likely take the standpoint of neither endorsing this nor denying it if done with the right intentions.
I think that’s a fair and great place to start.
One thing you may want to do short term, is just to tag bots somehow. Not so much for user transparency, but to flag would existing things would be impacted by any change.
The added benefit would be any user transparency it brings.
That being said, that may be half the effort already.
Oh, I agree, great concept and use! I'm just concerned what the rise of the DEV bots will lead to later, but I agree with the author and Ben that this isn't presently a problem, and making bots clearly labeled (as you suggested) first-class citizens will help keep the negative down.
You make an interesting point.
The first thing I'd like to say is that, to the best of my knowledge, I am directly not helping spammers in any way with this bot. As of writing this comment, the source code for the bot is not public, and so, without access to that private source code, spammers could not use that code for any purposes.
Another thing to say is that Daily Developer Jokes uses the DEV API, which provides the ability to create posts via a basic POST request to any DEV user give post data and a valid API key. So, in theory, anyone could use that API endpoint to create automated posts. In fact, one DEV member has made a Chrome Extension that utilizes the API to schedule posts (see article). The DEV API imposes "a limit of 10 articles created each 30 seconds by the same user", which the Daily Developer Jokes abides by.
Lastly, I'd like to just agree with @khrome83 , in that Daily Developer Jokes provides unique content, just in an automated fashion. From what I can tell, Daily Developer Jokes abides completely with the DEV Code of Conduct.
It would be interesting to see if more bots on DEV start appearing, and if and how DEV staff will react to that.
— Gabriel
Well done.
Thank you!
— Gabriel
Well done! I am really impressed by your work!
Thanks!
— Gabriel
Well done.
This is a great idea.
BTW your first joke was awesome. XDDD
Thank you!
— Gabriel