TezosNotifierBot: great release after great work

4 min readDec 30, 2020

TezosNotifier Telegram bot: https://t.me/TezosNotifierBot

As we wrote earlier, we have not disappeared anywhere. It’s just that we did a really great job — a huge number of improvements to our bot that need to be released in one big release. In this article we will tell you what has changed.

The Team

Firstly, our team was replenished with a new member — Emerido will help us with the improvements of our bot. We are very happy about this, as the experience of Emerido has already helped us a lot. This will allow us to develop faster in the future.

Thus, the team now has 3 members: Maxim “KeepCold”, Alexey “Emerido” and Evgeny “Tonoff”.

Infrastructure improvements

The most important thing. Why we were silent for so long.

We have completely updated our infrastructure and made a lot of improvements to the bot. You can already feel this, since the bot began to work very quickly: see how quickly the list of addresses is displayed by the My Addresses button in https://t.me/TezosNotifierBot, or how quickly messages about the end of the cycle are sent. This is a great job!

What exactly was done:

CI/CD: Implemented an automated pipeline for building, testing and delivering updates to our servers;
Monitoring: added centralized collection and storage of application logs. This allows us to set up alerts for new problems and to understand the problems in more detail;
Moving to Docker. More flexible and reproducible infrastructure;
The modernization of the code base has begun. DI implementation;
Moving from SQLite3 to Postgres. Allows us to process and store more data at high speeds. Extend the schema using migrations;
Implemented a BI system to analyze the behavior of our users and make exactly the necessary improvements;
Redesigned the RAM-cache approach — abandoned caching in favor of the blockchain indexer. RAM-cache has proven to be a complex and unstable mechanism;
During the modernization process, we have eliminated many bugs and made a huge number of optimizations.

We understand that our “new” approaches may look a little strange, but before that we had really outdated approaches to development.

So you are now using TezosNotifier v.2, a completely redesigned and improved version of the original bot.

Gitlab monitoring

Also for the baking community, we are releasing Tezos gitlab monitoring — https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos/-/releases. Now you will be the first to know about software releases!

You can manage this new type of notification in the Settings menu. We have enabled this notification for everyone who subscribes to delegate addresses and who monitors votings in our bot.

The gift

Finally… On the eve of the new year, we are releasing a cool feature — this is a gift for our friends from Bake’n’Rolls (they are one of the most active users of our bot), as well as for the entire baking community. Look at this message in the address list. Don’t you notice anything new?

Yes, these are custom emoji for delegate addresses! Guys, we know how you want to stand out and now you have one more opportunity. Write to us in the bot https://t.me/TezosNotifierBot using the Feedback function with your favorite emoji and we will set it for free in the bot for your addresses!

Let’s agree:

let’s not use obscene or offensive (?!) emojis;
the administration of the service has the right to refuse setting requested emoji without explaining the reasons;
delegate emojis must be unique! Therefore, write to us ASAP to be the first to set the desired icon!

Other features

As we wrote in the previous article, during the infrastructure work, we added two useful features:

added integration with tzkt.io to get names of public addresses. Now whale alerts will be more understandable, since the guys from Baking Bad maintain the most actual list of public addresses. Also, do not forget that there is a search in the address registry using the New Address button.

greatly accelerated the work of the bot.

Plans

Now we want to watch a little about the stability of the new release and will gradually add new features.

Of course, we rarely reveal our plans. But rest assured, we have a lot of ideas that you will love.

And, as always, we are ready to make new features at the request of the community. Therefore, write to us through the bot using the Feedback function and we will definitely consider your suggestions.

Links:

Telegram Bot: https://t.me/TezosNotifierBot
Twitter Bot: https://twitter.com/NotifierTezos
Twitter Announcements: https://twitter.com/TezosNotifier
Medium: https://medium.com/@tezosnotifier
Github: https://github.com/tnb-dev/TezosNotifierBot
Web: https://tzsnt.fr

Donate XTZ to support us: tz1g5jJc6MWdmmUXdp5eb1KTj8TTU5U74cry