Recently at work, some of us adopted using Hipchat over the Microsoft Lync. We needed something that could handle groups and not crash 10 times a day, and Hipchat provided that and a lot more. Once we discovered that it also offered an API, we of course started thinking about ways to automate common tasks with it, purely for professional purposes of course. That’s when I ran across Hubot for Hipchat, and then Triatomic.
Triatomic made it ridiculously easy to deploy and customize a Heroku dyno (a kind of instance) with Hubot and Redis running on it. We ended up finding a better type of free Redis instance, adding a handful of npm packages, and then introducing it to the group. It was a smash, and we nicknamed it carl after the emoticon in Hipchat, which itself is derived from the ATHF character.
If you have ever wondered what it would be like to have your own robot to throw witty remarks, sarcastic comments, and random google search images into chat I would highly suggest giving Hubot/Triatomic a test. It takes about 5 minutes to get a free Triatomic dyno running, and if you’re running Slack, IRC, Campfire, or something else, there are translator packages available for most systems on npm.