In a previous post, I created a Chat Bot Auto Responder. That little project was written in Go. It was deployed directly to GCP as a Cloud Function via the gcloud CLI.

I used two Cloud Functions, one for testing (responding to a sandbox channel), and one for the actual channel (production). After the initial launch, I pushed the code up to GitHub and wanted to use GitHub Actions as the CI/CD mechanism for future development.

This post describes the CI/CD workflow I wanted and what I settled on.

Chat bots are popular in the industry right now. They are used for customer service, devops, and even product management. In this post, I’ll dive into writing a very simple bot while dealing with an inconsistent chat service API.

I made my jump over to management a number of years ago when I was at a startup. I didn’t understand what I was getting into until years later. Management is rewarding and exhausting. It tests your courage and ability to handle conflict.

Why elixir for an embedded device? Elixir treats binary as a data type. Sending a binary stream to a device can be trivial and elegant. Pretend that we have a device that requires 17 bits per message (like a MCP3008 analog input). We can send a start bit, followed by a mode bit, then 3 bits for sensor id, then 12 bits of empty bits, in a very succinct way1:

It was hard to find a concise example of playing a short audio sound in an iOS application using Swift 3. I write one such example here for posterity: