SecretariaBot: a meeting scheduling helper bot for Telegram

What is this?

This is a Telegram bot I built for a group chat with some friends. We're spread all over the world, so it's hard for us to decide meeting times because of timezones. Somebody on the group thought a bot to figure this out automatically would be a good idea... and then challenged me to code it.

Eh, I didn't have anything better to do, so I took the bait.

I used the project as a chance to learn a few things:

• Ruby, because I've almost never used it. Keep in mind, the codebase is pretty ugly because of this. Very Java-y.
• Building a basic chat bot. This is not a conversational bot, it only supports commands.
• Dealing with timezones. Ugh. That's the worst part of the project, I'm a bit embarrassed by how clumsy the code is. It works, though.

How to run

1. Get a Telegram bot token
2. Get a Geonames username
3. Install Ruby: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/installation/
   • After you're done, also install ruby-dev for your version of ruby: sudo apt-get install ruby-dev
4. Install Bundler: sudo gem install bundler
5. Install Ansible: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/installation_guide/intro_installation.html
6. Install libsqlite3-dev
7. Run bundle install on the bot directory.
8. Set up the SecretariaBot systemd service by running: ansible-playbook ./secretariabot.yml. Follow the on-screen instructions.

Why "Secretaria"?

The moment I started the project, I immediately thought about the secretary bird character from Aggretsuko. In fact, my first iterations of the bot used dialog that was pretty inspired by her. I toned it down later because it was a bit abrassive sometimes.

I thought about using a picture of her as the project logo, but Sanrio wouldn't like that, probably.

Pending work:

• Fix that ugly, clumsy time translation code.
• Re-organize the code so it's easier to navigate. I need to split around all the chat bot methods.
• Unit tests. Seriously, I think this needs some to prevent regressions.