Slides, notes and resources relating to classes and tutorials will be added below.

Suggest additions by email or on slack

General

Articles

• David Boardman and Sera Koo Chatbots: Your Ultimate Prototyping Tool: How chatbots can teach us to learn what people need when designing products and services, Published on Medium
• Bots an Introduction for Developers - a perspective from Telegram
• Emilio Ferrara, Onur Varol, Clayton Davis, Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Flammini The Rise of Social Bots, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 59 No. 7, Pages 96-104 (see video)
• How to Think about Bot
• The Art of Bot
• The Coming Human-Machine Partnership in Creativity
• Interview with the Bot: “Is there a line between functional and aesthetic bots?”

Find many more here

Sites and aggregators

• Botwiki - Botwiki is an open catalog of friendly, useful, artistic online bots, and tools and tutorials that can help you make them.
• BotWatch
• Leeze Pritychenko’s Twitter Bot Encyclopedia - view online-
• Chatbots Magazine
• BotFunded

Week 1

Articles

• Who Needs an Interface Anyway?

Examples of Online Zero-UI Services/Invisible Apps

• http://digit.co
• https://getmagic.com
• https://hirepeter.com
• http://callfrank.org
• https://twitter.com/slashgif
• http://pentametron.com
• https://twitter.com/NYTMinusContext
• https://slack.getbirdly.com
• Facebook M
• https://developer.amazon.com/alexa

A great collection can be found in Ryan Hoover’s Product Hunt Collection Invisible Apps

Sinatra Resources

Ruby

• The Ruby Language - A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity.
  • see also Installation

Learning Ruby

• Try Ruby in your browser - 15 minute interactive guide to the ruby language
• Ruby in 20 minutes guide

Sinatra

• Sinatra - main site and GitHub Repository and Documentation - Classy web-development dressed in a DSL
• Learning and Mastering Sinatra - a helpful guide in the form of an interview.
• Rack - provides a minimal interface between webservers that support Ruby and Ruby frameworks.

Gems

• RubyGems - the best place to search for gems (aka libraries/modules/extensions) for Ruby

Week 2

SQL Databases - A Primer

• Getting Started with SQLite3 – Basic Commands
• SQLite - for all your burning questions about SQLite.
• SQLite3/Ruby Interface - the gem we’ll use to connect to SqLite databases

Active Record

• Active Record: The Rails Database Bridge - a primer on active record. Note this is written for rails. So don’t follow the tutorial (sinatra works a little differently in places). But the explanations of what’s happening are great.
• Sinatra ActiveRecord Extension - documentation of the gem we’ll use for interacting with Databases.
• Active Record Basics - the Rails guide to Active Record. As it’s pinched directly from Rails, this is a great read on how ActiveRecord works.
• Using ActiveRecord with Sinatra - a 10 minute video introducing ActiveRecord for Sinatra

APIs, REST and other stuff

• A Beginner’s Guide to HTTP and REST
• Principles of good RESTful API Design
• The Little Manual of API Design - a little more involved, but an excellent indepth resource.
• POST Form Data with cURL - a handy utility for making and testing web requests from the command line.

JSON

• JSON: What It Is, How It Works, & How to Use It
• Learn JSON in 10 Minutes
• SINATRA::JSON - sinatra’s documentation on JSON
• How to: Return JSON from Sinatra

Responding to Accept Headers and Templates

• Sinatra::RespondWith
• Views / Templates
• HAML - a really nice templating language for Sinatra/Ruby

Week 3

Deploying

• Heroku
• How Heroku Works
• Ruby on Heroku
• GitHub INtegration and Automatic deploys
• Heroku Scheduler

Twilio

• Twilio’s Programmable SMS
• Video: How to Receive an SMS in Ruby with Twilio - a video summary of the Twilio Platform
• Twilio SMS and MMS Ruby Quickstart
• Twilio Tutorials

Gems: - dotenv - Loads environment variables from .env. - giphy - A Ruby interface to the Giphy API,see also Giphy API docs - stock_quote - A ruby gem that retrieves stock quotes from yahoo.

Week 4

Recap. No new resources.

Week 5

Working with Slack

• https://onlineprototypes2016.slack.com/apps
• Slack API Documentation
• Getting Started with Custom Integrations
• Slash Commands
• Slack Developer Kits

[Tutorial: Slash command for Slack] (https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/building-an-anonymous-slack-bot-using-ruby-and-sinatra–cms-25494)

Gems: - HTTP Party

Week 6

• Slack Bot users
• Slack: An introduction to messages
• Slack Ruby Client
• BotKit’s Slackbot Tutorials and Resources
• Slack’s curated list of articles and tutorials

Articles and Considerations

• State of the Slack Platform — Amir Shevat, Slack
• A complete guide for launching successful Slack bots, VentureBeat
• A Surrealist Poetry Twitter Bot
• Bot Poetics
• Allison Parrish’s twitter bots and the performative critique of procedural writing

Week 7

• Alexa Skills Kit and the getting started guide
• Guide: Defining the Voice Interface - good primer on the elements of Alexa Skills
• Guide Built in Intents. Read also: Alexa Skills Kit Custom Interaction Model Reference
• Guide Testing a Custom Skill - helpful hits on prototyping your new skill.

Gems

• alexa-skills-ruby - great library for creating Alexa Skills in Sinatra
• iso1806 a useful gem to convert ISO1806 duration formats into integers.

Gems

• Ruby Gems
• Awesome Ruby - a collection of great gems organized by function.

Platforms

• https://wit.ai
• https://api.ai
• http://monkeylearn.com
• https://www.motion.ai