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Comment by kuu | Hacker News Reader

This is funny because just today I decided to join Telegram to develop a bot.

Telegram bot writing is silly easy. If you use the python module you can basically just write the whole thing as a set of functions in a file (with decorators that watch telegram for triggers) and one function that automatically polls and does all the responding at the end.

I managed to bang out a few when I had a day off a few months back. Very satisfying.

I have to check the documentation first, but I'm glad to hear that it's so easy. BTW, any recommendation about where to host the bot running?

I ran it off of a $5/month 'droplet' from Digital Ocean. As they are the only hosting provider I have ever used I can neither endorse nor critically review the service. I have, however, had no issues with them and find their various documentations floating around to be very useful and highly accessible.

Definitely want to agree with the point about documentation. I pretty much always end up using it if I need to set up docker on a new machine, or do other web app related ops tasks.

Thanks for the info!

Writing a Telegram bot is easy yes but writing a good one isn't. There are some very tricky things involved which you basically can not know and wont find in the Documentation. It forces you to run into problems first and then look for solutions. Especially if your bot gets decent amount of traffic something in the range of 1msg/s and above.

The people at https://t.me/BotDevelopment (unofficial) are your best chance for support because Telegram (bot) support is a joke.

What are those tricky things?

Matrix/Riot is super easy as well. I have a bash script to send messages with a http post.

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