37signals Product Blog

Hubot, GitHub's valiant Campfire bot, expands his capabilities

In his Automating Inefficiencies screencast, Zach Holman (left) showed some of the goofy ways GitHub uses animated gifs, inside jokes, and hacks to make their Campfire chat room more fun.

Now he's got a followup piece, Why GitHub Hacks on Side Projects, which talks about the importance of building out "a side project culture." For GitHub, a Campfire bot that does all sorts of kooky things is the answer.

Hubot, our valiant Campfire bot, has continued to grow in complexity. A tiny list of his (current) capabilities:

• unlock the door to our office
• print out a list of the people currently in the office based on their wifi presence
• find an apartment in the area to rent
• deploy GitHub
• say an arbitrary string over the office speakers
• play an audio sample of deadmau5 to everyone through hacked Propane HTML5
• give you a quote from any movie or TV show
• tell you the build status of any git branch
• track and map packages
• SMS any GitHubber from Campfire
• embed a seven day weather forecast

We’re building more and more into Hubot every day. (Before you ask, no, he’s not open source yet, and yes, a few people are working on that.)

Read the full piece to learn why Zach thinks having pleasant distractions and an open, shared space to explore together is important.

Funny screencast offers tips on "automating inefficiencies" in Campfire

This fun video from Zach Holman on Automating Inefficiencies shows some neat ways to waste time get creative in Campfire:

I decided to do one on some of the tools I use most in my day-to-day interactions with the rest of GitHub: Campfire, my dotfiles, and boom. By combining all of these together, we can successfully make your company’s chat room super inefficient. Apply some programming and boom, you’re suddenly automating inefficiencies.

Latest Propane update lets you use new Campfire conference calling feature

Conference calling was just added to Campfire. If you use Campfire with Propane (a Mac download that lets you run Campfire as a standalone app), you can now upgrade Propane and start making conference calls.

Just update Propane:

And then select Create Conference Call from the Room pulldown menu at the top of the screen:

Campfire tip: Type a person’s full name with just a few characters

What do you do when there are lots of people in a Campfire chat room and you want to direct a question or answer to a specific person? Simply start your message with the “@” sign and the first few characters of that person’s name until a yellow box displays showing that person’s full name. Send your message and that person’s full name will display in front of your statement in the chat room.

Note: This may not work if you are using a 3rd party application to access Campfire chat.

Campfire sounds: crickets, rimshot, and trombone

Keep things light with sound effects in Campfire. Type “/play crickets”, “/play rimshot”, or “/play trombone” and share a sound "message" with your group.

Note: This may not work if you are using a 3rd party application to access Campfire.