Smash Alert: Alerts for new French Smash Tournaments

March 26, 2019

ss of Twitter account

Smash Alert is a Twitter account that automatically tweets out new tournaments in France for Super Smash Bros. Melee and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

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.