Recently, I’ve been building a cute little project I call stu. What stu does is manage tasks and subjects for our university, it displays the current week and if there any tasks such as homework or exam or such.

I have been scratching my head for a way to do an editorial user interface. Basically what I need is a way for other editors to insert tasks into the system with authorization.

I could get the editors to email me a copy of the new tasks and I have to push it to the server and rebuild the website but that is a very tiresome and manual process.

A website could also work, but implementing authentication and authorization would take quite some time.

The thought of using a telegram bot crossed my mind, and I am glad it did. Bots are very efficient, and can be implemented similarily to http.

Plus bots seem natural to most of the editors, as they have previously worked with them. (Our division has a knack for telegram bots)

Implementing telegrams api is dead simple, you send a couple of http requests and authenticate them using a header. You actually don’t need a library to program bots.

Authentication & Authorization could be made using a simple and efficient in-memory key-value database. Where chat ids are linked to a bitmask of permissions.

For stu’s case I made a simple key-value database that has a name attached to it, so that each task can be edited & deleted by their respective owner.

The possibilities with bots are endless(just like the web), it’s an amazing platform that is available everywhere, don’t forget to give it a try.