22 Jun 2003 jibbler   » (Master)

Hi, I guess it's about time I made my first diary entry on Advogato.

Spending all weekend updating PircBot has made me aware of how hard it is to refactor and add new features to a reasonably-sized program without breaking backwards compatibility or making things look messy.

Still, I'm quite pleased with the results. I get a lot of feedback to suggest that it's the most popular IRC bot framework out there.

It's also nice to see the interesting things that the PircBot package gets used for. Some of the ideas I've seen are very original, ranging from bots designed to fill in peoples' timesheets, to bots that help out with online gaming. It's also nice to see the framework becoming increasingly used in research areas, and being from a graph drawing research background, I can certainly think of a few ideas of my own here.

I guess it's these kind of things that keep me working on PircBot - it's exciting - there's certainly no kind of monetary or job incentive.

Teaching people about PircBot is a rewarding experience when your students come up to you a few days later and show off their new creations.

Nothing delights me more than to hear from another person who has decided to use PircBot and become interested in the potential ideas they could implement. I suspect you may be the same - after all, you are still reading this...

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