2018.04.27 — Daily Fire Update

4 min readApr 27, 2018

Happy Fireday!

Hope you have had an awesome short week 😊

For these past two weeks I have been primarily focused on adding more features to df-slackbot. We also managed to onboard 3 new groups 🎉, I’m super excited about that!! Work has also commenced on adding the ability to manage your Spotify settings within df-web-app.

Let’s get into it!

🔥 Like Track from Slack

The first feature I wanted to add to df-slackbot was the ability to ‘Like’ a track from Slack. The hypothesis here was that by adding more functionality to the Slack bot, users would be more likely to engage with Daily Fire as they don’t have to leave the comfort of Slack.

Here we can see in the Bot’s reply there is the option to ‘Like Track’. There are a few different cases we have to handle, such as when the liking user doesn’t have a Daily Fire account. Luckily, the work we did last sprint on Sign In with Slack can be re-used!

Below are the different responses the Daily Fire Bot has:

**User doesn’t have a Daily Fire account.**

Once we finished Like Track from Slack it was time to check that off the Roadmap and move onto the next item, Follow User from Slack!

🔥 Follow User from Slack

With very similar functionality to Like Track from Slack, it was relatively straightforward to implement Follow User from Slack. I wanted to make this option less prominent than Like Track as I expected it to be used less.

Here we can see in the Bot reply there is an option to ‘Follow’ the posting user. Similar error cases had to be handled for this as well, but I won’t bore you with showcasing each again.

🔥 Onboarding 3 groups!!

This sprint, 3 new groups joined Daily Fire. I’m super excited about this!

We added 7Pounds, United Designers, and Fam Fire 🔥

This was also a very valuable learning experience as I now have a better understanding of what is required when adding Daily Fire to a new Slack team. It was made apparent that Daily Fire was lacking a few features when working with fresh Slack installs:

There should be an easier way to connect existing Daily Fire accounts to new Slack accounts.
There should be welcome messaging when a new user joins a Daily Fire channel.
There should be introduction messaging when the bot is first invited to the channel.

Beyond that, there have also been some great feature suggestions already, such as the ability to add a song to a custom playlist. I’ve made a note of this and plan to implement it along with ‘scheduled playlists’ (i.e. every Wednesday add all songs to a certain playlist)