squall_line said:
As far as using Slack, I just watch for the notification on my phone's lock screen, and go to the open tab on my laptop to purchase, if it was something I wanted.
Pretty much the same for me. I rarely click through to Recon from Slack but in the event something does comes up that I actually want, I've got my phone setup so I'm roughly 3-4 taps away from completing a purchase, just in case.
As for the Slack bot, when I first wrote it, I wanted to buy tools. Now that I've got most of the tools I wanted, the bot is an ongoing coding exercise to make it more efficient, faster, and useful (and to learn some things along the way).
This is what I see behind the scenes in the console when the apps are running:
The left side is how I get the status for active and discontinued products. It runs every 5 minutes, grabs a list of SKUs that need to be checked based on certain metrics (time since last update, current status, etc.). It then checks those SKUs against the different APIs their CMS uses, and stores the results. In this case, only one SKU (574368 - MFK 700 EQ-SET Trim Router) met the criteria and was checked.
Though, it's not always right as evidenced by SKU 769941. If you enter the SKU in the site search, it pulls up a different SKU with a picture but also provides a link to the correct SKU. Sometimes they are swapped. At this point, it's a guess so the bot provides a link in Slack to check for yourself.
The right side is the actual bot, which runs every 4 seconds (the first bot version ran in 30 second intervals). Wake, check, sleep. When it finds something, it grabs data stored by the product status bot, preps the alert message, then sends the alert to Slack. The alert engine is somewhat decoupled from the bot which would make it easy to write additional alert engines (SMS, forums, etc.), though I'm pretty happy with Slack.
Now that my boy is getting ready to crawl and work has picked way up, I haven't been seriously on Recon in quite some time, and have been away from this site almost as much.
The crawling stage! It's so much fun when they become mobile, enjoy!
