Strongedge.io

A few months back I had been working on programmability via Devnet for different technologies and bringing things together. I was spending some time exploring Webex teams, bots, and thinking of use cases for integration.

I had found bots interesting, but given the wide variety of existing bots and capabilities in Webex Teams, I didn’t see a differentiation for any project that I could work on. So I explored, and learned how the tool worked, and filed it away for future use cases.

Then came Covid. While i was visiting new family members in San Antonio, the Covid outbreak began really heating up, and everything just went really bad, really fast. The Stock market crashed. The toilet paper market crashed. We scurried home to find 24×7 news shows sharing the bad news, all the time. We started working at home, and anxiety levels became very high. Then came the murder hornets.

During the first few weeks I had an Idea. I wanted to have something positive, regularly. I thought about it and realized it would be ridiculously simple, to just create a webex bot that posts a positive message, daily, into a room, and share it with people. No intentional cross talk, no discussions with the Bot. Just one positive or inspirational quote delivered daily, into a room, at 9am PDT. 

I created my bot, scoured for a list of quotes (which is interesting, it is easy to find a small list of quality quotes, or a lot of “quotes”, but finding a long list of quality quotes that is easy to absorb digitally was, hit or miss). I then grabbed my raspberry pi, and fired up a bot and invited a few people. A few people invited a few people, and soon we had about 50 people. 

A few months in and a few people turned to a few more people, turned to a lot more people. There has been a few updates to the initial list of quotes, and a change in logic to use incremental quotes instead of random quotes (to avoid duplicates, thanks birthday paradox). A side benefit of this, is that while we discovered a few quotes were less inspirational, and a few authors had a lot of baggage… in updating and curating the quotes it’s had a positive impact on my life. It’s not my job to be inspirational quote curator for Cisco, but its a pet project and its kind of rewarding. I have to actually pay attention to the quotes, and paying attention to positivity is helping me manage through the stress of 2020. 

https://github.com/will0129/thedailypositive

internally its published to our eurl.io list.

I have created a second space that is external, and if you have a webex teams account, you can get a daily dose of positivity in your teams inbox. shoot me a teams message at wnellis at cisco