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  Daily Cat testing

Inspiration

Cat pictures usually brighten up my day. Software development can occasionally be lonely and depressing. Developer depression is a well known term and in order to avoid such in team based environments (especially teams using slack), a slack bot that daily posts cat pictures can really brighten ones day. Also, it was my first time playing with different api's and I thought it would be a fun project to do regardless!

What it does

First, a popular cat image link is taken from Imgur. Then, a slack bot is created which posts that cat images link to a slack channel.

How we built it

Everything was implemented using python. The imgurpython API is used to extract the cat image, the python-slackclient is used to create the bot and post the image to a specific slack channel.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part was configuring and learning how to use different API's. I have never used neither the slack api nor the imgur api so it was great fun learning those. Also, I was not very familiar with web requests and other web development practices and had lots of fun figuring issues relating to SSL.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was able to successfully learn both the API's and test out the bot on our slack channel.

What we learned

I learnt two new API's, I increased my development skills in Python and I learnt a lot about web development practices such as authentication.

What's next for Daily-Cat

I am planning on deploying it using Heroku or simply creating a new slack app that can be used by any team. I intend to expand it to display gifs and also give links to hot tech news on a daily basis.

Built With

• api
• imgur
• python
• slack