• How to build a simple Slack bot

    Slack is a wonderfully simple communication tool. Everybody is within reach of your fingertips. You can grab anybodies attention with a few key strokes. Distract them with a question whenever you are too bored to google the answer yourself ;-)

    It does not take many workspaces you are coerced into joining before you turn off notifications for most of the channels you are part of. However, some people have a very high signal to noise ratio and you would not mind being notified of their messages.

    Fortunately, this conundrum can be easily be solved with a simple bot. So let’s learn how to create such a Slack bot.

  • Bring RethinkDB's realtime magic to the frontend with GraphQL

    In a recent post we explored how RethinkDB’s built-in reactivity is a perfect fit to write a chat app with Socket.io. In this article you will learn how to use GraphQL subscriptions instead, to access RethinkDB’s reactive nature in the frontend.

    RethinkDB is a realtime document database. It is easy to use and schema-less, just like MongoDB. In addition, you can subscribe to queries and get notified when data changes, making it the perfect choice for realtime applications.

  • Build a Chat app with Socket.IO and RethinkDB

    A lot of tutorials can be found that teach you how to build a chat app with Socket.io. However, have you ever wondered how to best persist those chat messages?

    Enter RethinkDB, a realtime schema-less database. You can store and handle documents easily, just like in MongoDB, but it has reactivity built into it. That means you can subscribe to queries and get notified when data changes, making it the perfect choice when it comes to storing chat messages.

    In this article you will learn how to create a simple chat app with Socket.io and persist the messages in RethinkDB. To show the usefulness of a reactive database, we will also add a simple bot that reacts when you address it.