From Zero to Chatbot Hero
How can social media effectively bring together 30 likeminded strangers for a 2 day learning stint in 2 weeks?
It started in the Facebook group LevelUp. In its simplicity LevelUp is a community for women who want to learn to code. This initiative offers a safe platform for women at the early stages of learning to ask even the most simple questions in a judgement-free environment. Today there are 1900 women in the group, and it is growing every day. It is an indicator of the huge amount of interest in the IT industry there is among women in Finland.
Anna Sillanpää, Head of Marketing from HEL Tech, had come to the realisation that so many people in the past have run into — Coding is NOT rocket science, and you don’t need to be a mathematician, a scientist or even have studies under your belt to be able to learn how to code if you have the passion and an interest. With this realisation she posted a simple question on Level Up asking if anyone would like to gang up and build chatbots together. 30 people raised hands, one of them being Laura Vuorenoja, one of New Things Co’s Software Developers. Chatbots especially got her attention as New Things Co has built them in the past at Lab Time, which is a New Things concept, time set aside for learning new things together. The aim of Lab Time is to share knowledge across the teams inside our company, but us being all about transparency and openness, why stop at internal knowledge sharing and share our learnings with the wider public too.
Another simple question on New Things internal Slack “who here would like to help organise a chatbot building event for women?” and the second Laura of New Things and a dedicated Talent Weasel was sold. And there were three.
Through a couple of clicks and posts we had an idea for an event, 30 interested attendees, a team of organisers and a place (New Things office). We met twice to brainstorm the angle in the event, and agreed that to keep it inclusive - no previous experience was to be needed. We would build simple Chatbots and attempt to gain understanding of the technologies and usage of these little helpers, short and sweet. The event was fully booked in under half an hour, which is another tell-sign of the massive demand for events like these in the industry.
“The time went by so quickly. It was a great way to spend the weekend!”
The two-day event started on Friday evening by an introduction to the subject. Laura no 1 presented the concepts behind chatbots and technologies related to them. The field of chatbots is really versatile and even the definition of chatbot can mean different things to different people. One of the simplest definitions could be that chatbot is just like any computer program, it is just integrated to a chat app or a chat-like user interface. In this sense, the chatbot technologies are not revolutionary in any way. In most cases the chatbot technology itself is just about sending and receiving data over HTTP or web sockets.
Laura had prepared a demo of a simple bot that just sends data to chat UI. Slack had been selected as the target platform (the workshop participants were asked to setup Slack before the event). The bot was scheduled to send Pompier (local lunch joint) lunch menu to each weekday to Slack channel.
“I learned that you can practice programming also by combining ready-made software components and achieving something useful instead of always implementing another command-line utility for doing simple calculations.”
Our guest speaker, chatbot whisperer Mirva Nättiaho from If Insurance described how she had trained their chatbot Alvari to answer difficult customer support questions. Mirva’s sample case was a good demonstration how building intelligent chatbots needs (at least) the same amount of time and dedication than building any other web service. Each word and synonym to that word needs to be mapped to the system so that the chatbot can produce relevant answers!
Then it was time to get to know one another and team up for the workshop on Saturday. There was no prerequisites for the workshop, so people came from various backgrounds. Luckily, there were also some experienced coders present, so each team organically got a captain with coding background. The teams reserved an own working place from the office and made a war plan for the next day.
Laura had prepared a step-by-step instructions material for the demos presented on Friday. Most of the teams used these instructions as a basis for their work.
“At first I was afraid that implementing a bot with Node.js would be hard. However, it was amazing how much we were able to achieve with teamwork!”
There are various different technologies one can choose to implement a chatbot. Also the target platforms may direct the choice of tools. Most of the chat platforms such as Slack, Telegram and Facebook Messenger provide APIs developers can use for chatbot implementation. In addition, there exist a bunch of web services that utilize these APIs, so that you may be able to create a bot without coding a single line.
“I learned to use a bunch of coding tools in practice.”
The toolbox for Pompierbot was selected with the idea in mind that the teams would get to try as much the same methods Laura uses in her daily work as a web developer. The demo was written in JavaScript, run in Node.js-environment and deployed using GitHub and CircleCI scheduling capabilities. All of the tools are free for anyone to use.
Most of the teams had no previous experience with Node.js, but with Laura’s instructions and helping each other everyone managed to get the demo running during the day and even continued developing it further. At the end of the day, we had two lunchbots fetching menus from various restaurants (filtered based on user’s allergies), two weatherbots telling the user how to dress for the day and one newsbot that notified about the latest news.
The problem when learning programming is in many case realizing how the initial skills could be utilized to implement something useful. Quite often when you have completed an introduction course to a programming language, you know how to make a command-line calculator, but not actually how to go on about developing solutions to your own problems. In the chatbot workshop the focus was more on the tooling and integration of ready-made libraries. So learning the JavaScript language itself for building the program logic was not given that much emphasis. People seemed to value this approach, since we received a lot of good feedback about familiarizing to different tools.
It was amazing to see so many talented and driven women in our office. One of our missions is to create an inclusive environment where diverse teams can thrive and innovate, and we are always looking for ways to learn how to improve. We hope that as many as possible came to the conclusion that this industry is not just for people who have started coding when they were 9 years old. Anyone can do it. We also hope to see a lot more of these types of events in the future. Drop us a line if you would like to organise one and collaborate.
Written by Laura Toropainen and Laura Vuorenoja, New Things on the Block
