GitHub Satellite 2016, 13 Sep 2015

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From YouTube: Collaborating with Hubot for a more efficient DevOps workflow - GitHub Satellite 2016

Description

In this talk we'll introduce you to Hubot, an open source robot who sits in your company's chat client to help your developers by doing most of the heavy lifting. We'll look at how he can bring GitHub and many core DevOps tools and philosophies to developers' fingertips and why everyone on the team gains from this benefit.

Brent Beer has used Git and GitHub for over 5 years through trainings for GitHub, contributions to open source projects, and professionally as a software developer. Brent now works as a solutions engineer for GitHub in Amsterdam to help bring Git and GitHub to developers across the world.

About Satellite:
GitHub Satellite 2016 was a celebration of the latest and greatest in development. Watch the recordings to learn how engineers, founders, activists, and beyond tackle the latest and most difficult challenges in software.

For more, join us in San Francisco on September 13th-15th for GitHub Universe, three days filled with the creativity and curiosity of the largest software community in the world.

For more information, go to githubuniverse.com.

A

So we all have our problems. Some are big. Some are small soon all of our problems, you all will be taken by the robots, so hopefully moving forward some of these problems, knowing what the status of something is is a task. The robot goes and finds for you how many people knew Hugh bot before you came in today, okay and those people who knew Hugh bot? How many are interacting with you bots today, great always good, to know the audience and know how much people are interacting with the robot.

A

He bought one of my favorite pieces. Open-Source software we've had him for about six years in one form or another. Maybe it was a previous form of JavaScript. Now it's CoffeeScript a little bit more easily bundled up, but he's been by our side all this time, working with us to be this personality within our company, the most important employee of github, maybe Hugh bot as I've seen. Some people refer to our company. As so it's been about six years, and you know we can say the robots are coming.

A

We saw with robots, aren't necessarily a new thing. We've all maybe built our own fun robot and a chat client, or that does some operation for us, but they're a pretty hot term, just like the term DevOps. So there may be new to a lot of people, but they've been here for a while, but that doesn't mean they're, not cool, and you can't still work on them. People say: oh, it's been around for a while. I don't want to work on it's not cool anymore, but it's becoming stickier and stickier.

A

We see even facebook mentioning that within their platform they have all these bots on facebook, messenger I think when there was a Call of Duty bot that came out that had some tens of thousands of people, interacting with it Shopify mentions that there's 5,000 orders that go through their Facebook bots, so that may not be a company bot but a bot nonetheless or a robot.

A

Nonetheless, I haven't experienced those Facebook bots myself, but the internet can feel like such a vast space, sometimes and also a very small space, but we have a faster rate of more people. Building BOTS they've been around for a minute. We saw at Microsoft's conference at Build. They talked about their bot framework, so that's a reference that I have a link to it's up on github to build your own bot within the Microsoft framework, so not Hugh bot, so I, don't love it as much.

A

I have an affection towards hee bot, but there's a lot of things out. Then there's a lot of ways to get at that, and that's action item number one. So we'll see some steps to take away from this talk at the very end here and I. Think action item number one is just to admit that you want or need a robot. So maybe you don't need it, but you want it. It's fun start having some fun at your at your job.

A

You also don't want to get left behind. You need to keep your company up to date, so you can start building a robot to start keeping things going faster. Keep your developers a little happier. So, let's think about this from a DevOps perspective. The whole point is to make this a more efficient, DevOps workflow, so robots help us by tying together these multiple tools. Finding out what service just got a notification, maybe you have a Nagios notification that goes on sends he bought and then comes to chat.

A

Maybe you have an escalation of some Zendesk ticket that your support team needs to know about, so they help us keep track of everything. That's going on. We mentioned one of those things with the browser tabs I took switch between all these things. I don't want to do that anymore. I just want everyone to be notified of all the things at one time.

A

In one place, a robot can act as our kind of servant to go grab that information and bring it to that one place so offload some of those responsibilities of our robot and really any robot will do I mentioned Microsoft has their own and there's Hugh bot and I love, Hugh, but I think it's easiest one to get started with.

A

Maybe you have a robot that it's simple purpose is to just go: grab you butter and bring it across the table, as we see here from this episode of Rick and Morty, and they can start out as fun, but as it gets more and more adopted, you'll start thinking, just like you would, with any software development practice that it needs to be more efficient.

A

So the thing here that Hugh bot can go grab for us can be an image, a cat gif, an animated gif, finding out how many days I left until one of our next conferences in Europe, which is code Kampf in Copenhagen, so using Wolfram Alpha, we can say wolf meat days until October 24th. He about returns. That number of days.

A

Again have fun at your job right. We've seen many people across all of the get up slack channels, saying pug bomb pug me quirky, me weather me just finding out. What's going on having fun being more connected to your coworkers, so we talked about keeping things, knocking down the walls between teams, for productivity and for deployments and and working.

A

But what about the social aspect to getting to know your co-workers a little bit you find a funny animated, gif or Hugh bot finds it for you because of some query you typed, maybe everyone else will start to know you a little bit better and they can start interacting with you. I think this is pretty good. It's always very entertaining it's maybe a little distracting during our day, but it does bring us closer together.

A

So we have all those things we have Hugh bot we're starting to think about all these dull dirty dangerous tasks that all define here in a little bit as well, but I think all these things kind of tie together around this concept of chat, ops and how many people have heard about chat, ops, okay, less people than I think people have heard about Hugh bot, which still good there is a there's.

A

Reddit.Com slash, are slash, chat, ops, but I see a lot of people from other communities contributing to one thing: that's really nice about this is tops, as a definition is something that brings and manages technical and business operations to a group chat. That means is not in some server some terminal window, some script, I'm executing on my laptop or a cessation of the terminal. It's happening right in chat, whether it's a reactive or a proactive thing.

A

Maybe like we see here at Jerry or JCH, telling Hugh bot to deploy some docs update, stop maybe deploying code he's deploying documentation, changes he's able to do that too, because he knows exactly the command to do that from Hugh bot. So why is this important? Hopefully it's a little obvious to see how cool this could be to just be in chat and see all your billed notifications have people deploying software together instead of on silos. I think this might be the best picture in the whole talk.

A

So if you have a Cameron, you want to grab a photo of this. Do so now, or do so in the recording. But this right away is breaking down our communication walls between teams, there's not just developers that hang out in this room. There's ops, people, there's support people, there's documentation, people if a documentation or a support person saw one of these branches being shipped. We see, Parker had opened a pull, requests, 55,000 and 89 to add IO Knights to the find command for the pages garbage collector.

A

Well, if that changes, some sort of documentation that we have the documentation or support came can see this, of course, on the pull request, you can bring him into the conversation, but we're at least in one common medium here. So as a developer, I, don't know how to I. Don't need to know how to deploy this code manually I can just do it from Hugh bot. Someone did it one time very well. They defined that process. They probably wrote it in a script, and now we have this robot that can just go.

A

Do that for us, for the same reason that we write functions in our software, we don't want to repeat the tasks we just want to call the function. Our function here is Hugh bot just call the function, but this is also helping everyone around me learn so how many people are hiring at their company?

A

Alright, in some form, people are hiring you're growing, you're, a growing company. How long does it take people to deploy and contribute to the deployment process or to feel more involved in things happening? I can deploy code at any time with github in certain applications, because I know exactly what the command is. I can type dot, deploy or Hugh bot deploy. It'll return to me, the information that I need.

A

So nice part about being a distributed team, and we see all these mentions in these technical practices, but some of managing this is actually just finding out. What's going on in breaking down those walls and seeing those changes, so everyone's learning we're always pair programming at the same time. So here's an example: I, don't necessarily wouldn't know what this command was. But I can query the help command then go see that command. So we can see if we need to do any back ports within our github Enterprise releases. This is the command that does it.

A

I need to find an ami out there on Amazon. This is the command that does it or finding a CI status, but let's not get carried away. Let's see how this actually happens or where we need cubot to be so. Hugh bot can live in many places. Irc Skype hit chat, even iMessage you can iMessage. He bought to find out. What's going on, so slack makes this quite easy.

A

There's a integration and I can actually go through and do this I don't know if I should pretend that I'm actually typing this to go through it do this, but of course this is just a recording in any slack room you can find the integrations type for Hugh bot install him into your room.

A

Now, of course, this isn't going to build the bot for you, but this is going to set it up so that you can have that robot into your room. So one piece had the medium. The second piece of this will be where Hugh bot needs to live. So Heroku makes this dead. Simple. One of the Heroku talks later today will be about the different deployment environments for using Hugh bot, then maybe to deploy how to those different environments, but Hugh bot can be one of those environments as well.

A

So let's see this in action as well: I did the Hugh bot code downloaded into some application here and I. Have the Heroku toolbelt, so I run Heroku create creates it for me, I, add I. Do some add-ons I need the Redis brain so Hugh buck and remember certain commands and then that's done and last but not least, I need to tell her oku, where this bot is gonna live with the the URL, for this is gonna, be which, of course, you can name at any. Given time when you say Heroku create.

A

And then the last piece of this is that slack URL or that slack API token. So the very last piece is once you bots there and it has the adaptor to connect to slack Hugh bot needs to use the slack API to actually join the room. So when you setup the connector you have that token.

A

Don't worry I reset the token already, so you can grab a photo of this if you'd really like and then I push to Heroku and Oroku receives that that build information and runs through those steps and actually completes that for us.

A

My TV upfront went away so that receives the pack and it builds the information and then we're all done so step. Two pick a chat, client at an infrastructure and release that thought and then the last but not least, the automation just to finish this out here. This is not necessarily the best photo that I want. You bought to return to me, but Hugh bot has this this attitude for us, and this is the cream of the crop. This is what we want.

A

Ge has his amazing blog post and I've seen this in other technical papers as well, but there's dull, dirty and dangerous tasks, and they say it's a robot's work, so I believe this to a dull job, taking bags at a hotel. Ok, that seems like something I can automate cleaning out sewers or crawling in manholes, make a robot do that? That's not a fun task. I, don't personally want to do that.

A

Maybe patrolling some campus or doing explosive handling. So we're not talking about Hugh bot here, but we're talking about you know. Maybe space exploration, that's like code analysis said of sewers. Why not finding the server to do your deployment instead of patrolling your campus? Why couldn't we think of this as monitoring and reporting?

A

So we have those builds running, push notifications, sorry into the room, pull requests that are running, etc so find your dull dirty and dangerous and make Hugh bot do it. The first thing: that's pretty dull is finding out what the status of CI is or what the build status is, or what the deployment status is make that deploy status, go to Hugh bot and Hugh. Bot can tell you when that deploy is finished. Tell you where to go to see exceptions that have been raised lately.

A

So what are the next steps? I talked about these three things. I've talked about Hugh bot. We saw some cool animated gifs. We saw some cool animations and the burndown of DevOps, so I talked about DevOps when we started mentioned the description, so DevOps is something that's great to move towards, because it's gonna break down those walls between your teams and if you break down those barriers, you're going to be happy, you're gonna have happier developers because they're gonna be communicating with one another. It's not gonna be that blind action anymore.

A

Keep track, use the robot to keep track of that work for us find out when a build is done to notify some other team, then picking that chat, client or that infrastructure that robot lives on is important as well.

A

Excuse me, the robot has to be live, has to be on a server and it has to be able to coordinate those tasks. So that seems like a pretty simple one, so the first no-brainer she may be thinking about those, but you have to actually do that work. It's like seeing some an exclusive roped-off area. You have to start doing some work to actually experience that, so you have to do those first, two steps and I think they were pretty quick and easy and then last you know, start thinking about finding those tasks.

A

What is the CI status of this feature? How can I deploy? Where can I deploy what's the deployment status? What's the weather like where this other employee is what's the time of where this other employee is so I can work better with them?

A

So nothing can stop us now and I'm going to show you how with you bot, let's work. Thank you.