What it does
The Timeline bot joins a channel and immediately begins aggregating data into a clean timeline to facilitate efficiency and oversight for team members and leaders. The Slack bot listens to and scrapes data from channel events. Currently, Timeline focuses on GitHub integration and file upload, but also has the infrastructure for custom commands and aggregation of numerous other data points: message sentiment, other integration services (Travis CI, custom bots), and specific mentions.
How we built it
Timeline is built on React for the front-end, Firebase as a data layer, and Node.js on the backend. For the backend, we used Slack's official Node library to directly talk to the Slack Real-time messaging object flow. By this approach, we are able to observe every message from Slack, to include user activity level (sleep, active, typing), text messages, bot messages, and file uploads.
Challenges we ran into
Using the Firebase wrapper for React on the front-end was fairly difficult.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
It was really awesome to watch the bot come to "life". The front-end of the application is really nice as well and we're very proud of the way it turned out. It's crisp, intuitive, and above all useful.
What we learned
We learned all about Slack bots and the timeline.js!
What's next for Timeline
Further integration on the front-end to leverage the power of all the data points that we're collecting. Exploring sentiment analysis and other machine learning potential of the data we collect in order to maximize effectiveness of the platform.
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