Resuscitating Hubot

I’m resuscitating Hubot.

Because I’ve always loved chatops. A bot at my fingertips that I can program to help me and all my friends, too.

I know, it’s probably for naught. Everyone has moved on. Slack built BoltJS. Microsoft built BotFramework, and Discord has discord.js.

But Hubot is so cute.

Development on its codebase stalled. The last time any significant changes happened was around 2015.

I started this journey by posting an issue in August, 2019, asking what was happening. Crickets.

I followed up with another issue in April, 2020, which received more responses. But I think the maintainers had also moved on from Hubot, and Github (many were employees). Sadness took hold. A glimmer of hope came from a couple of people posting supportive comments on that issue, though. Which boosted my motivation.

In April, 2023, I emailed one of the Hubotio owners and they responded. They were a Hubot contributor prior to jointing GitHub about 9 years ago and have been super helpful; reviewing my first Pull Request (PR) and merging it, resulting in the first release (published to npmjs) since March, 2019.

Hello, Hubot. Again. It’s nice to see you.