Take 10

An anti-social bot for Facebook Messenger

It's live!

Take 10 is a bot that gets you back to work. Just tell it how much time you wanna procrastinate--ten minutes tops--and it'll inundate you with messages until you finally get the hell off. Try it on Facebook Messenger. It's built as Node.js app running on Heroku. Much of the logic comes Jerry Wang's tutorial.

When you go back to work and then return to Facebook, it'll remember you from before and prompt you to enter another time.

Running locally

Equipped with a Facebook app, make sure to set up:

• the webhook is pointed to https://yourapp.herokuapp.com/webhook/,
  • save the access token as a config var: heroku config:set FB_TOKEN=YOUR_APP_TOKEN
  • and store the webhook verify key as a config var as well: heroku config:set VERIFY_TOKEN=YOUR_VERIFY_TOKEN
• your app receives message_reads and messages from Facebook,
• you've added a Postgres database: heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev,
• and you npm installed all the dependencies.

Files

Duration

duration.js converts a duration written in plain text into a number of seconds. Example input:

five seconds
5 secs
four minutes and 23 secs
23m and 6sec
one thousand four hundred and twenty two secs 

Output:

5
5
263
1386
1422

Since it's measuring time duration, it maxes out at the unit thousand. For these purposes it's fine, though.

Readable

readable.js converts a time in seconds into human-readable text. It simplifies however possible, using hours, minutes and seconds.

Example input:

5
263
1386
382734

output:

5 seconds
4 minutes and 23 seconds
23 minutes and 6 seconds
106 hours, 18 minutes and 54 seconds

Note: the bot caps the duration at 10 minutes. For one, it's consistent with the name, but also I wanted to avoid running a JavaScipt timer over such a long time.