I programmed a thing. It’s called Probot. Probot is a quick and easy way to get high quality answers to your accounting and tax questions. Probot will find a real live expert to answer your question and handle all the details. You can get your questions answered over Facebook Messenger, Slack, or the web. Answers start at $10. That’s the pitch.

Seems like a natural in this new age of bots, doesn’t it? I thought so anyway. Not so much (so far), but more on that later.

I think Probot is interesting enough to cover because it’s a good example of how one programmer--me---can accomplish quite a lot using today’s infrastructure.

All this newfangled cloud/serverless/services stuff does in fact work. I was able to program a system spanning Messenger, Slack, and the web, in a way that is relatively scalabile, available, and affordable, while requiring minimal devops.

Gone are the days of worrying about VPS limits, driving down to a colo site to check on a sick server, or even worrying about auto-scaling clusters of containers/VMs. At least for many use cases.

Many years of programming experience and writing this blog is no protection against making mistakes. I made a lot of stupid stupid mistakes along the way, but I’m happy with what I came up with in the end.

Here’s how Probot works....

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