Boredom and COVID-19 Telegram Bot

As COVID-19 is spreading further, I decided to play safe and minimize my social interaction. So I have been staying at home for a couple of days. But last weekend was rather odd. Starting the weekend, I got bored quickly. I got super bored. And the fact that I couldn’t do much made me frustrated. Around midday, I decided to start a project to keep myself busy. A project that can be both interesting and beneficial.

Given that I like to spend most of my free time coding, I picked up a new coding challenge. And the challenge was to create a Telegram Bot to track the progress of COVID-19.

Why a Telegram bot?

For the last couple of months on and off I have been working with Telegram bot seriously for a personal project. And since I didn’t want to spend a long time on it. I also was not interested to go and study other platforms like Twitter, or WhatsApp APIs for such a tiny project. Additionally, I was not in the mood of doing a project involves building frontend as it’s my weakest coding area.

Anyway, to make the long story short, after spending a couple of hours, I managed to get it done and deploy it to Production! It was an amazing experience for me. But it me exhausted at the same time. Though, it’s worth every bit of the exhaustion. It’s such a rewarding experience.

This bot uses Java Spring Boot and GitHub Actions as the CI/CD pipeline to deploy the latest commit to the master branch to Heroku automatically. Of course, if the pipeline fails, nothing gets deployed.

That’s my story of boredom and COVID-19 Telegram bot.