Smash Alert was created by Sam 'PeterPunk' Ettahiri. I quickly spoke to Sam to learn more about the project!
Tell me a little bit about yourself
I'm Sam, 26 years old, and I'm the CTO of CapSens, a Ruby on Rails Web and Mobile Agency based in Paris. In my free time I play drums in a Metal Band and I play Smash.
Why did you build Alert Smash?
I joined the Parisian Smash community only 4 months ago, when I discovered Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and the tournaments for it. Recently I had trouble registering for a tournament- I was always late since Parisian tournament got full in less than an hour and I'm always working when the tournament announcements go out :(
So I decided to make a bot that sends me text message when a new tournament is published. First I showed it to my team mates and they asked me to send a message to our Discord so that they could register, too. After a few weeks, every French Discord Admin asked me to put my bot on their Discord. So I decided to create a Twitter bot. That way, all of the French Smash community can benefit from my work.
How does it work?
It's very simple. It's a script how runs on a crontab. Every 10 minutes, it gets all the upcoming smash tournaments in France and sends a tweet. Once the tweet is sent, I store the tournament ID in a DB so I don't tweet twice about the same tournament.
How did you like working with the new API?
It's pretty funny. I always wanted to learn GraphQL and thanks to start.gg I got a opportunity to test it. At the beginning it was confusing but once you get it, it's a pleasure to work with. For an alpha it's pretty well documented and even a complete beginner with GraphQL is able to make something out of it.
Are you looking for contributors?
Since it's a dead simple script, I won't work on it anymore (except if the API changes). So I don't need contributors :p
What are you looking to build next?
Actually I'm working on a seeding tool for TOs. Since Ultimate brought a lot of new players, seeding became complicated. So I'm making a tool that ranks every French start.gg player to help TOs in their seeding.