Building your own Slack bot

There are many cool things one can do to leverage the power of Slack – private channels, embedding various content, searching all the messages from one place, sharing files and code, using some of the many available integrations or building one yourself. In this post I will focus on the last one. I have finished such an implementation myself recently. My project was a creation of a simple Slack bot for scheduling foosball games for my teammates called Foosie. It is a Spring Boot application that I open-sourced and it is available on GitHub. In this article I will share some of the noteworthy aspects of this little project and hopefully entice you to give it a try yourself. Continue reading “Building your own Slack bot”

Spring Cloud AWS with proxy settings

In my previous article, Spring and Amazon Web Services, I provided a brief introduction to Spring Cloud AWS module and what you as a developer can expect from it at this point in time. One thing that is not obvious from the official documentation is how to use this module when your Internet connection is restricted by a proxy server. In this post I will outline how to approach passing of proxy configuration for both Java-based and XML-based configuration. This aspect of configuration will probably be addressed in the future releases however it might help you now in case you work with this module and need your application to work with a company proxy.
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Spring and Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (or AWS) is nowadays one of the most common choices of the infrastructure and hardware providers to use and deploy to. Many Spring applications have tackled challenges of integrating the application infrastructure and the underlying layer. These in-house solutions differ in complexity and the degree of sophistication when it comes to the design and the actual functionality. One of the key attributes of success of such a solution besides the proficiency of the team is the overall knowledge and experience with AWS Java SDK. Based on the way Spring Framework has been designed and maintained, it was only a matter of time before Spring introduced a module dedicated to bridging the gap between AWS and the way we configure our Spring applications. I want to discuss some aspects of adoption of this relatively new module in this post and also point out what to look forward to and what to watch out for.

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GitHub and Jenkins integration

Jenkins is a well-know term in many teams around the world and has been for quite some time now. As many organizations migrate their source code form centralized version control systems to git, GitHub seems like a great tool to support and simplify work with git. Needless to mention its great support for code reviews by the concept of pull requests. Both Jenkins and GitHub are great tools on their own but it would be really nice to integrate them and leverage the power of automation even more. In this post I am going to describe my attempt to do so.

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