Do you like Reddit? Do you like bots? If you answered yes to one, both, or neither of those, then you are in luck. This post will go over how to build a Reddit Slack bot in Haskell.

This is the second Haskell post here on the Twilio blog. So if you haven’t read the first one on setting up your Haskell developer environment, check that out here.

What are Slash Commands?

According to the Slack API site, messages beginning with “/” are treated differently from other messages: they “enable Slack users to interact with your app directly from Slack” and all send their messages “…to the configured external URL via HTTP POST.”

In this post, we’ll build a custom slash command that shares a trending programming post from Reddit about whatever you pass it as a command. For example, if you typed /redditbot python, it would return an ...

Functional programming languages are gaining in popularity so let’s hop on that Haskell bandwagon. With Haskell, you can write clean, concise, and expressive code. Don’t believe me just yet?

Now let’s dive into setting up your Haskell developer environment by

1. configuring two package managers
2. installing Haskell
3. making a “Hello, World” program
4. sending our first SMS with Twilio using Haskell (get a Twilio phone number here)

IDEs for Haskell

There is no complete Haskell IDE (so if you want to make one, the market is wide open.) Many Haskellers use Atom because it has the language-haskell and ide-haskell packages, whose syntax-highlighting of aspects like import statements make it stand out. They also help ...

Data stored in Excel spreadsheets can be hard to read with anything other than Excel and it’s especially tough to compare two specific datasets within all that data. One possible solution is Python. It can do the dirty work of finding the information for us while also being pretty fun.

In this post we will read NBA statistics from a Microsoft Excel sheet using the Openpyxl library. How will we know which statistics to look for and return? Text a Twilio phone number two players and a type of basketball statistic (like total points or three-point-shot-percentage) and then the SMS response will look up the statistics of the corresponding players like so:

Want to skip the tutorial and jump right into the code?  No problem, head over to the complete code.

Otherwise, let’s get started.

Getting the Data

This post uses data for each player from the 2016 ...

As my now-teammate Sam Agnew once told me, a developer evangelist should have “the mind of a hacker, heart of a teacher, and soul of an entrepreneur.” The following anecdotes explain why this advice really resonates with me and why I’m ecstatic to be interning with the evangelism team in NYC this summer.

1.  “Young, scrappy, and hungry.” – Lin-Manuel Miranda 

Who would attend their first hackathon and not work on an app, and then sit awkwardly to the side while everyone else demoed? That’s embarrassing, right? Well, that’s just what this wide-eyed freshman who had only a month of CS education under her belt did. I did, however, attend workshops, work on homework, talk to mentors and hackers, and soak up the innovative and collaborative atmosphere. I still didn’t know what git was, and my definition of an API was spotty, but feeding off of ...