How to create a Slack bot to automate tasks for you
What you’ll learn
Build a Slack bot
Build a custom slash command for Slack
Respond to interactive Slack messages
Persist state in a conversation flow
Requirements
You have a fairly good handle on JavaScript, including ES6.
Description
There are so many aspects of businesses that can be automated using Slack.
What does it mean to automate a task?
Imagine being able to take a process in your business, and be able to get a bot to not only do it for you, but also do it perfectly every time. Not to mention your bot can be working 24/7, often perform tasks much faster than a human, and check on updates to systems every few seconds instead of hours or days. aka. the perfect employee.
What sort of tasks can be automated in Slack?
Almost anything you can think of. You’re only limited by your creativity.
Say a client wants to know their balance on their account. They could email you, and then you reply. Or you could give them a slash command to retrieve their balance whenever they want.
Maybe a developer needs to log time they’ve worked. They could go into an accountancy system and manually enter that time, and then send a message to a project manager to let them they’ve finished their task. Or… you could give that developer a single custom slash command that will perform all those tasks for them.
So what are we going to learn in this course?
Let’s say you have a company where employees can submit purchase requests for things they might want. They would normally fill out some form, give it to a secretary, who would then take it to the CEO to make a decision on. That secretary then needs to give that feedback to the employee who requested the purchase.
The secretary will also monitor all the purchase requests, so that if the CEO has forgotten to make a decision on one of them, that secretary will remind the CEO.
In this course we’re essentially going to code up this entire flow, primarily by turning the human secretary into a Slack bot. So that the only human beings who will use the system is the CEO and the employee making the purchase request.
Pretty amazing right?
Overview
Section 1: Introduction
Lecture 1 Welcome
Lecture 2 What we are building
Section 2: Setup core infrastructure
Lecture 3 Create a Slack app
Lecture 4 Create a custom slash command for Slack
Lecture 5 Setup development environment
Lecture 6 Get an Express server up and running
Lecture 7 Setup ngrok
Lecture 8 Using git and an introduction to Slack’s message builder
Section 3: Creating a Slack bot
Lecture 9 Create a Slack bot in our Slack app
Lecture 10 Coding up the sendDM function
Lecture 11 Review of sendDM and using it to send a direct message
Lecture 12 Formatting and creating dynamic messages
Lecture 13 Displaying buttons in Slack messages
Lecture 14 Refactoring our code for handling routes
Lecture 15 How to process button clicks in Slack messages
Lecture 16 How to modify original interactive message after button click
Lecture 17 Send feedback to the user who made a purchase request
Section 4: State management
Lecture 18 Introduction to state management
Lecture 19 Scaffolding a code module for Firebase
Lecture 20 Saving data to Firebase
Lecture 21 Review and getting the key for each record
Lecture 22 Overview of using Firebase as the memory of our Slack bot
Lecture 23 Reading data from Firebase
Lecture 24 Code cleanup and planning on sending reminders to the CEO
Lecture 25 Adding a timestamp when a purchase request was made
Lecture 26 Recording the CEO’s decision in Slack bot’s memory
Lecture 27 Review and code cleanup
Section 5: Monitoring purchase requests
Lecture 28 Read all the purchase requests
Lecture 29 Iterating over the purchase requests
Lecture 30 Analysing each purchase request
Lecture 31 Making a decision when to remind the CEO of specific purchase requests
Lecture 32 Sending a message reminder to the CEO for specific purchase requests
Section 6: Concluding thoughts
Lecture 33 Summary of entire application
Lecture 34 Overview of how to move this application into production
Lecture 35 Some final tweaks to the CEO’s personal assistant
Any developer who is interested in automating tasks in a company using custom slash commands and a Slack bot.
Course Information:
Udemy | English | 4h 42m | 3.00 GB
Created by: Andrew Golightly
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