GitHub is open-sourcing Hubot, a chat bot it developed internally to deploy the site, automate a lot of tasks and be a source of fun for the company.

Hubot grew and eventually became a force at GitHub. But it was also messy at times so they rewrote it.

According to GitHub, today’s version of Hubot is open source, written in CoffeeScript on Node.js, and easily deployed on platforms like Heroku.

But Hubot is more than a chat bot. Hubot is standardized. It can share scripts. That means it can communicate with other robots. Now that’s pretty cool.

So what can Hubot do?

Hubot ships with a small group of core scripts. These are for posting images,
translating languages and integrating with Google Maps.

And people can add their own scripts to make the bots unique. GitHub is maintaining these scripts made by the community so you can add a little more life to your robot.

The fun part will come when people add more personality to their robots. GitHub encourages people to add a dose of individuality to their robots. They should share jokes, have their own eccentricities and as GitHub says, enjoy a certain merriment.

Services Angle

Ahh. Robots. They seem so well suited to the services world. We need robots. There is just too much to manage and too much to process. Just look at IBM Watson. It is in the same family as Hubot. Like Hubot, Watson helps people. It’s a robot that can live in many communities. That’s the future and it is inextricably tied to big data analytics and the major themes of the day.