zulip-cronmoji

Emojified RC check-in reminders broadcast on Zulip 🌇 💻 🐙 🕥 🚨

Contact

John J. Workman (@workmajj)

I worked on this software during my time as a Recurse Center facilitator. If you'd like to join a warm community of programmers dedicated to self-improvement, you should consider applying. :-)

Description

I use this program at RC to announce our regularly scheduled check-ins automatically. Because sending a message via Zulip is as easy as making a POST request, I tried complicating things by working in C, and by implementing a simple template language for the messages.

When cronmoji runs, it gets the current time, rounds to the nearest half-hour, and then uses this info to evaluate a random message template. Templates can specify adding the time as a string ($t), adding a clock emoji ($c), or adding three randomly selected fun/goofy emoji ($e). The final message string is published to the Zulip stream and topic specified as command-line args.

Features I won't be adding, because this is a silly project:

• loading template string and emoji arrays from external files
• pinging specific people rather than the whole group
• making the program into an interactive bot that runs in the background

This project will eventually be obsoleted by internal RC tools.

Build & Usage

1. After cloning the project, open src/tpl.h and customize the array of message templates and/or the array of fun emoji (of which TPL_NUM_EMOJI are randomly chosen):

    const size_t ZULIP_TPL_SIZE = 12;
    const char *ZULIP_TPL[] = {
        "$c Yay, @**all**, it's time for $t check-ins! $e",
        "$e @**all** Yo, it's time $c for $t check-ins!",
        "$e Get excited, y'@**all**, 'cause it's $t check-in time! $c",
        ...
        "Heads up, @**all**, it's time for $t $c check-ins! $e",
        "Hey @**all**, it's $t check-in time! $c $e",
        "ZOMG @**all**, it's $t check-in time! $c $e"
    };
   
    const size_t ZULIP_EMOJI_SIZE = 48;
    const char *ZULIP_EMOJI[] = {
        ":100:",
        ":art:",
        ":clap:",
        ...
        ":volcano:",
        ":watch:",
        ":zap:"
    };
   

2. Next, build the program from source:

    $ make
   

3. Then set up your environment to export the appropriate Zulip API credentials. These can be sourced from your .bashrc if you'll be running cronmoji repeatedly:

    $ export CRONMOJI_EMAIL=<your-zulip-api-email>
    $ export CRONMOJI_KEY=<your-zulip-api-key>
   

4. Now you can test cronmoji manually (a dedicated Zulip test stream might be good):

    $ ./cronmoji <zulip-test-stream-name> <zulip-topic-name>
    {"msg":"","result":"success","id":12345678}
    @**all** 1:00 check-in time :clock1: has arrived! :octopus: :computer: :smile:
   

5. Finally, add to launchd or cron to run at certain intervals. Remember that the time will round to the nearest TIME_TICK_MINS (defined in src/time.c as 30 by default) when announcing check-ins. So a job that runs at 12:40, for example, will round to 12:30; but jobs at 12:45 and 12:50 will round to 1:00. All times are in 12-hour format because of emoji availability.

License

This software is published under the terms of the BSD 3-clause license.

See the LICENSE file for more info.