Looking back at 2018 and forward for 2019

We made a ton of progress on Yetibot in 2018 and gained some new contributors in the process! A few high level contributions include:

• launched this site and started a major effort to write comprehensive docs
• added pagerduty
• added catchpoint
• migrated weather to a new API provider
• added karma
• added github releases
• added support for Slack Reaction-based observers 🤯
• added gcs for Google Cloud Storage
• added cron command
• created a GraphQL API
• built a new web dashboard and shipped it as yetibot-dashboardnpm module
• added render for custom command output using its data
• improved the way we record chat history in the database, including Yetibot's own output
• fixed a ton of bugs 😁
• made errors from a command explicit, enabling us to abort a pipeline early when there's an error
• improved Slack auto-reconnect
• added ability to reply to threads in Slack

Contributors in 2018 💥

• @cheukyin699
• @cvic
• @devth
• @gaberger
• @jcorrado
• @kaffein
• @linuxsoares
• @teodorlu

2019 Roadmap

Documentation

While we made a great start, the docs are not quite there. This will be a focus of 2019: continuing to improve coverage of documentation!

For user docs we'll add coverage and examples for more commands, as well as continue to add more complex examples that showcase some of Yetibot's more advanced features.

For dev docs we'll improve documentation of Yetibot internals and make it easier for new contributors to ramp up.

Web based REPL

We'll work on a truly interactive Yetibot REPL React component and use it on the docs site so users can more readily play with Yetibot while exploring the docs.

Data

Toward the end of 2018 we experimented with propagating data behind pipes for each command. We'll continue exposing data on all commands and play around with some potential usage before solidifying this potentially superpower feature.

Configuration

Command configuration in Yetibot is currently spec'd out with schema. We'll move to clojure.spec and start to leverage some of its capabilities for things like:

• web-based config validation
• config generation (as opposed to a manually maintained and potentially stale config.sample.edn)
• friendly command output with help docs when a command is not yet configured

Dashboard

The current dashboard was a great starting point. Now we need to make it more usable by improving the way history renders, adding more filters to history to search on, adding pagination or infinite scroll, and improving visibility into the health of the Yetibot instance.

Screencasts

We'll post more screencasts that demonstrate contributing to Yetibot and what an interactive REPL-based development workflow looks like. We'll try to utilize Clojure 1.10's new features as well as the more experimental stuff that Cognitect is putting out, like how REBL fits into our dev workflow.

And much more

We'll continue to build fun stuff as it comes up, like we've done all along. Feel free to join us!

And check out the good first issue issues in the tracker to jump into contributing!