Playing With Salesforce Bot Toolkit

On the Salesforce developer blog, they had a neat post: A Toolkit for Creating and Deploying Bots Inside Salesforce.  It is only a simple regular expression based bot, and I'm sure there are other Bot APIs out there, but the post seemed pretty inviting and looked fun, so I decided to take it for a spin.  It was every bit as fun as I thought.  I may port Zork over to this ☺

First installing and setting it up was pretty easy, just follow the post about it.  Works just like they described.  I think I fall in love when I tried out the select feature.  I could imagine all sorts of neat developer utilities put into that like run test and search the audit trail for who broke my stuff :)

Of course, you don't truly understand something until you hack at it, so I created a few simple Bot Handler.  Just look over the Handler apex classes for examples.  Of course, before I set off to re-create Zork, I did a simple one to create a task.  I did it two different ways to play with the framework.

MongoDB and Spring Boot - Easy as a Dream

I have a long history with SQL databases.  I've almost been tempted to write a basic one from scratch a few times for the fun of it.  But I haven't worked with a NoSQL database before.  With it raining outside, this seemed like a great day to give one a try.  Thus, I started looking into MongoDB.  I was prepared for this to take awhile, but this was like a dream.  I think I spent more time writing this blog post than it took to get going.

She'll Be Comin Round The Mountain

Okay, not a mountain, more like a large hill, or whatever you call a pile of dirt that goes up over twenty feet with a windy road laid on top going around a sharp blind corner.

I was coming up on this corner, debating how fast to take the corner.  And I noticed I couldn't see around the side of it.  Thus, I opted for the suggested speed sign, always a safe bet on a corner.  As I was coming up the road, there it was.  A semi-truck pulling a trailer came around the corner towards me.  They weren't just slightly over the line.  They were a good solid into my lane by at least 3/4ths at apex and then started moving back into their own lane.

2 Thousand Miles

Two Thousand Miles!

1 Thousand Miles

Officially broke 1000 miles - Great way to start the New Year's!

Last Ride of 2016

Today was 40 degrees outside and 20 MPH wind.  But it was the last day of the year and I couldn't resist getting in one final 2016 ride.  Plus rolling over past 900 miles to 905.7 miles.

Riding When Its "Raining Cats and Dogs"

Day after Xmas, it was warmest it has been a long time, with a high of low 60s.  But, over 10+ mph and heavy rain and some thunder storms.  What do you do on a day like that?

Well, here's what I did.  I watched the forecast for when the thunderstorm would be past, looked at the radar to see what else is coming.  I didn't want to be out in the lightning, but I figured rain and wind would be good practice.

After the thunderstorms moved through, I went out.  Initially I was thinking I'll go out for a short trip.  I've mainly been driving around in town, giving the cold, so that I could get back home quickly.  But a little bit down the road, the rain starts and the wind blows strong.  That helps me decide - around town some more.