dropbot
A subscription-based Facebook messenger bot to scrape for the latest drops on ACRNM
I co-created this project in a mix of panic, excitement, and the slow creeping feeling of unemployment. I spent a couple months doing Leetcode questions with my friend on Google Hangouts while working as a test technician during the day and wanted something to show for all the practice I was doing. Functionality was finished within a week and a half, but integration and actual deployment didn’t happen until two months later. My friend and I decided to start this bad boy when we saw techwear company acronym raising prices to 200% of their initial offerings. The project is hosted on Heroku; it runs through continuous integration and a development app before fully deploying changes and creating a release.
The messenger API would time out more often than we thought. Persistent menus also weren’t fully working most of the time during development because the refresh rate for them caused a bit of trouble. Gunicorn servers (dynos) also shut down without constant access from users, putting strain on investing fifteen bucks a month to run the app.
There are many future improvements we want to make, including shifting our messenger API to fbchat, a more updated version of fbmq. We were also thinking about shifting towards more of a hands on server instead of Heroku; something like DigitalOcean or Dreamhost. We’ll see how it goes…
Take a look at the project: dropbot
Sup
Software engineer @ LitePoint.