An educational twitter bot that tweets about WWII era military cooking. Fun and yum!

Twitter account: @ArmyCookBot1

twitter account on launch day

Army cooking bot like most of my projects came out of a mixture of artistic vision and ich to explore a new technology. I find twitter bots a compelling form of communication. This haze around what content is human authored, machine, or a combination of the two is a fun playground. Currently this bot leans more toward the outwardly machine, but that may change as I attempt to instill the army spirit.

Inspiration: https://www.are.na/travis-shears/twitter-bots

From a tech side I used this project to explore recurring containerized tasks, in this case kubernetes cronjob. Army cook bot runs as a python cli app inside docker container that starts up in my kubernetes cluster once a day at 15:00h. The main take aways were that config for deployment, job, or cronjob in kubernetes are all basically the same, meaning skills cross over well. My cronjob.yml includes a new feature for me scheduling while leveraging concepts I already know like config maps and registry secrets. One hiccup I encountered was my home internet being to slow to upload a 500 MB docker container to the project’s docker registry. This I solved by cloning the repo onto one of my Frankfurt servers and building and pushing the image there, no automation for this project yet. Moving forward one changed I’d like to do besides adding more diverse content is move master.txt and sayings.txt into a volume mounted config map so I could update then via kubectl and not need to update the image.

Repo : github gitlab

The plan is to support this bot with daily content for the next few months and while hopefully writing a few more bots to create a series.