joharasmus / botsproject Goto Github PK

It might be useful to have some way of informing other users on discord when a (major) push to this repo has been merged. I'm open for suggestions on the exact implementation of this service. Another bot? A webhook? Manual service? Smoke signals? Morse code? Just brainstorming...

Add some doc-comments for clarification of the code.

Since I've figured out that there's actually a free-forever offer on GCP (= Google Cloud Platform), I'm thinking of migrating this code to there. That would also make accessible a much wider range of choices for Operating Systems and software configurations, e.g. Ubuntu 22.04 - which supports recent versions of Python.

Primarily I would see this as an opportunity to get away from Oracle Linux, which has its own assortment of quirks (did someone mention dnf?).

The current Python codebase is very fragile. Touch something, change some part, and it will fall apart in not-very-pretty ways. That could be remedied by adding simple exception handling, which would send a message to a dedicated bot-chat channel on the Discord server. The only way of knowing whether something bad has happened, currently, is the status of the bots - which is worse than printf-style debugging.

The current implementation of Worky is lacking in some aspects, one of them being its statelessness. This leads to a few issues:

1. Worky is "stupid" in the sense that it repeats recently created/updated ads on restarts.
2. Worky will miss ads if the hosting cloud platform goes offline for some time.

Those problems could be resolved by building a DB-backed stateful solution. The Platsbanken API documentation on GitLab recommends the usage of a dedicated SQL server which, considering the expected usage in this case, probably is overkill. The most trivial alternative implementation would be storage in raw .json files which could be manipulated directly by the Python stdlib. If that is too slow for us (most likely not!) we could try out a MongoDB(NoSQL)-backed storage. It would be more performant but also require more configuration and development.

I would recommend the first implementation (reading to / writing from raw .json files).

Python is, have always been, and will always remain a dynamically typed language (with its own pros and cons). The last few versions of Python have tremendously refined its type hinting capabilities, though. One might ask then, what is type hinting? Well, it is the practice of introducing the syntactics of static typing without the semantics associated with it. In Python this is primarily used when writing function/method signatures.

Why do this? After all, type hinting is purely syntactical and doesn't make a difference when running code. Well, the primary reason is its versatile integration with the PyCharm IDE, which alerts the programmer when they write code that uses return types / parameters in a way that conflicts with their expected type. This leads to significant improvements regarding maintainability and readability.

While not strictly code-related, it would be nice to move the bots to a discord team, in order to enable token sharing between members of the team. We might need 2FA for that, though maybe that only applies to me.

Worky currently publishes lots of ads that aren't relevant to us. I think we could add a few filters to get a better experience.

The bots are currently heavily uses code duplication and several other poor coding techniques, "smells". A thorough refactor could alleviate parts of this. A few suggestions of possible improvements (to get us started) are:

1. Reimplement the bots using OOP design, as in the official Discord.py documentation.
2. Extract common functionality to a "base" bot class, and let our specific implementations inherit from it.

Do not hesitate to present other ideas (based on object oriented analysis, design patterns or principles)!

Setup the action runner to be hosted on the GCP instance - this would result in a much cleaner deployment, without SSH (hopefully)!