donut-style random pairing for members in a certain channel

[bobheadxi]

Donut is an app that pairs random folks in a Slack workspace together to talk. That's basically all it does, and costs $50 a month. Now, Rocket can already send messages, and it is aware of all our members and channels... 😉

[chuck-sys]

Hmmmmmm....

[bobheadxi]

This was brought up in the leads channel with a lot of support from me, @tarikeshaq , @johnagl , @sandyklc . I use it at work and it's a really nice excuse to force a conversation :)

[chuck-sys]

Oh I didn't go to the website and thought that it was some dating thing for Feb 14 or Apr 1....

[tarikeshaq]

Did a quick look around, as someone who has not worked with Rocket before this is roughly what I had in mind:

• Add an api call to interface/slack.py that creates private conversations with a set of users
  • Possibly a second api call to send a message to a private conversation.
• Add a scheduler https://rocket2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/docs/Scheduler.html (and init it and all that)
• Make scheduler get everyone in the slack channel we choose (probably a config value?) and run simple randomization and start a private conversation with each pair of people
  • Probably send a nice message afterward to make it less awkward
• Some tests
• $$$$

[bobheadxi]

Do we want to track who has met up with who? To avoid repeats, and maybe to collect stats? It might be sufficient to just stuff this metadata into the User model since it's periodic and not very frequent, ie:

{
  pairings: [
   {
     user: otherPerson,
     time: time,
    }
  ]
}

Then we can drop entries after X time to allow re-pairs

[chuck-sys]

DDB has tables that let you enable TTL columns so that it auto-drops entries.

[tarikeshaq]

I think I'll have time over the next couple of days to give this a go unless someone else wants to take it 👀

[bobheadxi]

Go for it! ❤️