I am enjoying writing programs in a short time, like in a Hackathon way. Here in Vietnam we don’t have Hackathons often, so yesterday I decided to make one for myself with a time limit in 3 hours. The goal was to build/deploy something that will work and people can try it. I decided to go with Bot for Slack (or another messenger in the future).

So I wrote this Stranger Bot to meet strangers in your Slack, explore new people. It’s anonymous and private, Bot doesn’t store any data.

How it works?

• The User opens a private conversation with Stranger Bot.
• Types Hi.
• Stranger Bot finds random active user who doesn’t participate currently in Stranger conversation.
• Bot will forward all next messages sent by user to Bot to the Stranger user. Without mentioning who sent this message.
• Any user can type Bye to finish the conversation, and type Hi again to start a new random one.

Here is an example of how it works at Wizeline:

alex.pliutau [10:29 PM]

hi

Random WizelinerAPP

[10:29 PM]

Connecting to a random Stranger …

Stranger found! Say hello, and please be polite. Type “bye” to finish the conversation

hola!!

alex.pliutau [10:31 PM]

Nice, super private

So it will work to find random person to talk

Random WizelinerAPP [10:31 PM]

wat

hahaha

alex.pliutau [10:31 PM]

bye

Random WizelinerAPP [10:31 PM]

Bye! You finished conversation with the Stranger. Type hi again if you want to start a new random one.

Random WizelinerAPP [10:31 PM]

Bye! You finished conversation with the Stranger. Type “hi” again if you want to start a new random one.

Try it

• Create App in Slack and copy API Token
• Run docker build -t stranger . && docker run stranger -e SLACK_TOKEN=<token> with a valid token

Contribute

All code is open sourced. Feel free to contribute or raise an issue.