Doing NaNoWriMo my own way

NaNoWriMo is something I've been vaguely aware of for several years now. I've seen it mentioned online, and my brother even participated in it once.

If you're not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. The goal of the event is to write about 1600 words every day during the month of November. If you keep up your pace, you will have written a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month.

I've never had a huge appetite for literature. I rarely make it past the first hundred pages of a book, and have very little interest in writing fiction. But I do program. And there are projects that I've wanted to work on, but never gotten around to. So, instead of writing a novel, I'm going to spend every day in November working on a programming project.

Introducing, HamBot.

HamBot will be a Twitch chat bot intended to be run from a Raspberry Pi on your home network.

Twitch chat bots come in two basic flavors. There are chat bots like the StreamLabs chat bot that you run from your personal computer. The other flavor is a bot hosted and run by other people, like NightBot. The benefit of a hosted bot is that it is always on, even when you are not streaming. The downside is that you relinquish a lot of control. A streamer friend complained to me recently that the chat bot she uses has no way to export data, such as channel quotes or stream currency (fake internet points by viewers the longer they watch the stream).

HamBot's goal is to provide the benefits of a hosted solution, while leaving the streamer in full control of their chat bot. HamBot will be "hosted" on an inexpensive Raspberry Pi that a streamer can connect to their home router, do a bit of configuration, and then leave on 24/7.

The main design problem here will be to make installation and administration user friendly to the average streamer. This is the main thing I intend to solve by the end of November. HamBot itself will not have many advanced features. Those are fairly easy to add once the basic installation problem has been solved.

If you like, you can follow along here: https://github.com/haydenmuhl/hambot