Chat – Martin Minnock

Finding a good excuse to learn a new technology is something I’ve been interested in for a while particularly as the pace of change and technology adoption only ever seems to be increasing. Knowing that the IT world is in an ongoing state of flux, finding an engaging way to learn about the tech that technologists are expected to know is more than idle curiosity, it’s essential for career success.

Revisiting Chatbots, a topic I encountered through a Wired article from summer 2015, I discovered that getting a chatbot up and running, and more importantly, useful and usable, involved a wide variety of different technologies. As the article was heaped so much praise on Github’s bot, I decided to try it out with a view to having it do some useful tasks around AWS administration, one of the two challenges that had been put up to our 2016 interns.