My friend Jimothy L. Quadratic made something pretty neat a while ago: Lita (a chat bot). He surpassed me in coding ability and interest a long time ago, and has been progressively making a name for himself on the Internet with all sorts of projects besides Lita, too, but his chat bottery seems to have garnered the most attention thus far.

Lita is written in Ruby, something I've tinkered with in the past (like many programming languages). I tried to get a working Ruby on Rails personal project beyond the simple boilerplate, but never followed completely through (Railsbridge, notwithstanding). I've written test scripts in Ruby, and I've played around in IRB for a while. But until now, I've never really made something in Ruby. It's a small something, but it's not nothing.

What am I talking about? First of all, check out lita-crazycaps. It's a handler for Lita, which is basically a plugin that extends its behavior, giving it a new "command", per se. Mine just takes a string of text and randomly alternates the capitalization of it, turning it into an illegible mess. Not super useful, but something to use as a foundation for any other ideas I come up with.

Thankfully for me, Lita has a great built-in template for new handlers that creates all the files you need to make it work (and test it). Even someone like me, who is not particularly experienced in Ruby, can make one that does some simple string manipulation. And so I did. And now I kinda want to make more :-D