ancientcityruby/call_for_proposals_2013 — pull request #12 by technicalpickles (2012-11-08 14:42:25+00:00)
Title: ChatOps: Campfire as a Console for your Company

**Assumptions:**

* Group chat is a great tool for collaboration
* With enough code, anything is possible

**Proposal:**

* Write code to create a robot helper for your group chat to handle menial, annoying things for humans

You know about lmgtfy.com, ie let me google that for you? What if, every time you had a question about how something works, or where to find something, or what to do, you could simply ask a robot helper? For example:

* How can I contact customer X?
* Where are the NewRelic graphs for Y?
* What's the deal with billing for customer Z?
* How many alerts have there been in the last 24 hours?
* Should I make an iced latte, or a regular type latte?

Rails Machine has been a distributed team for many years, and group chat (specifically Campfire) is a great tool to work together to get stuff done. In order to serve our customers, we have to interact with a dozen or so SaaS, self-hosted, or self-written applications, many of which are only loosely coupled. Over the past two years, we've been slowly building our robot helper to help navigate those services, to connect the dots, and generally make our lives easier.