📅 6/7 @ noon PT - Automating gr2m/helpdesk, Episode V

[gr2m]

💁🏻 Automating gr2m/helpdesk, Episode V
📅 Monday, June 7, 2021
🕐 12:00pm Pacific Time (in your timezone)
🎙️ no guests
🏷️ Automation

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Automating gr2m/helpdesk

I've laid out the current process for this repository at https://github.com/gr2m/helpdesk/tree/f085060fb98f61a005c9e79df15fdad6466c6a1a#how-i-use-this-repository. It's mostly manual. Time to spice it up a bit with some automation!

In this show, I'll will finish up the automation around tweets, following the past two episodes #20 and #20 and #12

Outline

1. Quick review of what I've build so far with tweets in episode II, episode III, and episode IV
2. Update and delete scheduled tweets.
3. Run the automated tweets script whenever a new show issue is created or updated

Preparation

• Figure out how to send authenticated requests to Twitter's API using the app and user credentials. None of the existing twitter SDKs provide the APIs to update or delete scheduled tweets.
• 30 minute announcement tweet
• start of show tweet
• comment on issue
• recording available tweet

Recording

Shownotes

• I updated the workflow that currently updates the upcoming/past shows to now also create / update / delete scheduled tweets: https://github.com/gr2m/helpdesk/blob/168ae414488996c5af8464c36f8103b30b79b4bc/.github/workflows/update-shows.yml
• I ran into a timezone problem. The servers of GitHub Actions run on UTC timezone, and when I ran the workflow the times of the scheduled tweets were off. I had to workaround the problem by using day.js' timezone plugin. But that collided with custom time format parsing, so the resulting code ended up looking like this:

// workaround: cannot parse "June 3, 2021 1:00pm" but can parse "June 3, 2021 12:00pm"
// workaround: cannot set default timezone, so parse the date/time string first, then use `.tz()` with the expected date/time format
const timeStringWithoutAmPm = timeString.replace(/(am|pm)\b/, "");
const tmp = dayjs(
  [dayString, timeStringWithoutAmPm].join(" "),
  // "MMMM D, YYYY H:mma", // see workaround
  "MMMM D, YYYY H:mm",
  true
);

let time = dayjs.tz(
  tmp.format("YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm"),
  "America/Los_Angeles"
);

[gr2m]

Video is now on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG2r_E_tfeo