September 2017 – Happenings

Goodbye 42 Version 4.

Welp. The day draws near. The day we say goodbye to the 42 that we’ve known and (mostly) loved for the last 18 months. The day I introduce fully her newer version, 42 Version 5 (or 5.1 depending on how semantically specific you want to be I guess.)

TL;DR: There will be a 3-6 hour downtime at 11AM BST 30/09

The Changes

There is a huge laundry list of changes that will be made to 42 in this update, but the most notable one involves granting 42 the ability to run on multiple shards, which means no more shard limit, and by extension, no more need to prune the bots servers. This also means that there will be no more minimum member limits on inviting the bot, so you can have your small testing and private servers back again.

University and the big update

42, IRL

So as a few people may know, on the 16th I went to university. I am going into my third year of a computer science degree, which means I have to create a big project that they will mark me on. I’ll continue talking about this near the end of this post, but right now the thing that everyone is here for.

42 is nearing her major update

For those of you who don’t know already, for the last 15 months, I have been refractoring, rewriting, updating, adding to and generally improving 42’s codebase. And for the past about 9 months, these updates have been available for public use under my second bot Beta 42. I’ve been wanting to make this update for just as long, but there was one key thing stopping me, namely, Discord’s “shard” limit. The tl;dr of this is that a bot can only exist on 2500 servers before the developer needs to make some changes.

Rewriting Beta 42

So a while ago, the main Discord library utilised by my bots was given a major update to how it was structured. To most people that doesn’t mean much, but to me, it means I needed to re-write my bots before the Discord developers do something to break the current branch that they use. With that said, users of Beta 42 may have noticed a significant drop in perceived productivity towards that versions code and feature set. That was because I have been updating her to rewrite branch instead.

Hello Again, World

IRL

Hi, I’m squaswin’s friend, Frawst. I was just given permission to write posts for this blog and have no idea how it works, so I decided to write this as a test run.

I also happen to create Discord bots in Python called Redditbot and Pinksquid, but this isn’t a blog about myself so I won’t get into that.

Please ignore me, I have no idea what I’m doing.

Hello World

42, IRL

Hi. I’m Sam Rockett, or as you may know me, and how I prefer to refer to myself, squaswin. I am a university student learning computer science and am about to go into my last year, but enough about me.

For the last almost 2 years now, I have been learning Python, and creating a bot for Discord called 42, who in that time has managed to propergate to over 3,000 servers and affect the online experience of nearly 200,000 different people, entirely by word of mouth. Today, I decided to finally create a real website for her, and in my endeavours, I thought “why not create a blog and portfolio too?”

Currently, 42 is in private mode because of the 2500 server shard limit, but her future version Beta 42 is available to join your server if you want her.

So here I am. My first blog, my first real website. I’m going to try my best to keep everyone up to date on what is going on with the bot and what is going on with myself too, though in the immediate future, watch out for:

Beta 42’s big update
The final merge of 42 and Beta 42, and the
Me going back to university and starting my first year

It’s going to be fun.