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Making Gitcord

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I recently was sent an invite to a GitHub organisation and a Discord group known as «DevingOnDiscord». From my understanding, it's essentially a group of lads who use Discord to turn a profit with their software. Frankly, I've never really cared about making a profit from my service, but I decided to help out with some of the projects. One of those being Gitcord.

Gitcord is a Discord bot that allows people to search for repositories via GitHub's API. It's pretty simple. Written in TypeScript with Discord.js, it uses the /search/repositories endpoint to query for results. It works not too far from the following:

  1. You call the command and provide a query (eg. git!search user:doamatto)
  2. It takes your query and:
  1. The data provided by GitHub is then:
  1. All the data is coagulated into a MessageEmbed(), or embed message, using data from:

Overall, there are some flaws with how the bot operates that may be addressed by current maintainers, such as missing types (with the infamous TSFixMe as a placeholder) and rate limiting from not using a token. However, for the average person who might see the need to self-host a bot to search GitHub, this gets the job done easily.

Shortly after development in January 2021, I transfered the source to the DOD team. Unfortuantely, the group has since disappeared from the Internet, along with the Gitcord source.

Reflecting on a dead Discord bot#

This is, as far as I'm aware, my second Discord bot ever. The one before wasn't terrible, but it just wasn't something I wanted to keep maintaining. Discord is one of those platforms that has always been iffy to me; can't quite put my finger on what exactly does it to me.

Maybe some not so fateful day I'll make a return to the Discord bot market. I've helped Jack from time-to-time with BlueJay and Astral, but never enough to consider myself a bot developer or someone who actively works on bots. At the end of the day, I'm not sure. Ve vill see what the future has in store for me.