From Development to Production: kappabot.tv — Prologue
My game of choice is Dota 2, a online multiplayer video game that I like to describe as a mix between chess and basketball. Ten players are split into two teams and battle in real-time to defend their base from being destroyed. However, I’m not very good and I don’t play much anymore but I enjoy watching professionals play as they test their strategy and reaction time live on Twitch.
The fun thing about Twitch is that each streamer has their own persona and personality. Some enjoy being silly while others are more chill or serious.
All channels have their own chat room and share a number of emoticons across Twitch while partners of Twitch can create their own custom emoticons. For example, typing “PogChamp” in chat converts the text into an image of this face:
People use PogChamp to express amazement and surprise. When a player in Dota 2 makes an amazing play, you’ll often see a lot of people typing PogChamp in chat and watch the faces scroll by. It makes the stream engaging and interactive and builds a sense of community when you start incorporating custom channel emotes.
About a year ago, I had the idea of building an emote counter, something that tracks the occurrence of emotes per minute in a chat room. By seeing which emotes were most popular, you could do an ad-hoc form of sentiment analysis of the chat in general.
At the time, I was interested in Elixir too and explored how to connect to Twitch chat through Elixir. My goal was to build something functional before The International, the largest Dota 2 tournament of the year. Unfortunately, I didn’t complete the project and it was left as a project to-do floating in my head.
Over the past year or so, I’ve been more interested in the early stages of startups especially around DevOps, operations, and tooling. How do you bring an idea to life? What are the best decisions to make at this stage to increase your chances of survival? Indie Hackers does a great job interviewing builders how strategies and tactics they used when bootstrapping their businesses. I also enjoyed listening to Season 1 of StartUp, a podcast where they documented their journey on building a podcasting company.
I want to do something similar. Although my goal at the moment is not to build a business, I am approaching my side-project as though it is a product to take from development to production. I’ll be writing down why I make certain decisions, what unforeseen challenges I run across, and how to technically push your app to production.
Follow along on the DevOps for Startups blog and visit kappabot.tv to checkout the current iteration. Thanks for reading!
