With the rapid pace of innovation in the tech industry, it can be difficult for tech professionals, programmers, and developers to keep their skills current. That being said, reading technology news and blogs every day is one of the best ways to keep up to date on the latest trends and skills needed in tech.

Finding a few good articles or blogs to read from, especially ones that are relevant to your area of expertise at your spare time, can be daunting sometimes not to talk of the time spent scrolling through a plethora of articles that don't interest you. What mostly annoys me at times, is the fact that an individual spends his/her precious time to read an article with a "click-bait" title only to realize that the contents has nothing to do with its title!

Hmn...

So, after a long time of pain, I decided to create a bot that gets me the right news update I need at a certain time. Yes, I know there are so many options out there to give you and I the same result we need or an even more optimal result but, I just felt like solving my own problem without leveraging on the other Giants like medium, and co... 👀

Uniquely for me, I am building a bot that recommends news update for the user based on two variables; user's preference and keywords in the article (not title because sometimes it can mislead). Then returns to user the "title", "summary of content", and its "link" through Telegram. 😌

First of all, I webscraped and cleaned data from a site, like Hacker News to get title and link of recent news available. By reading from the link of an article, I figured out next the keywords (list of words which frequently most occurs in the content) of each article. After that, I check whether an item in the preference list given by the user corresponds to any keyword. If it does, get me the summary of that article and update the user through Telegram and Whatsapp (if the need be, using the Twilio sandbox).

whew!

Before you begin, ensure you have met the following requirements:

• A virtualenv python3 -m venv </path/to/new/virtual/environment>

• You have the version of modules in the requirements.txt file. requirements.txt installed in the virtualenv

Or, if not ...

• cd to the directory where requirements.txt is located
• activate your virtualenv

On Windows, run: </path/to/virtual/environment>\Scripts\activate.bat

On Unix or MacOS, run: source </path/to/virtual/environment>/bin/activate

• run: pip install -r requirements.txt in your shell

scraper.py Basically webscrapes data from the hackernews and get the relevant keywords from each article.

article_summarizer.py summarizes the content of the article

job.py schedules a job or a function to run at the background whilst the main thread runs

wallie.py is the brain behind the telegram bot

post_news.py further post updates to its user through whatsapp

Start Bot	Add to preference list
Item added	View preference list

When there's no news update for user after searching.

But when there's news...

Update me on telegram	Update me on whatsapp

check out the Wallie🧐 in action or run the wallie.py script

python3 wallie.py

You can decide to host the code on heroku to deploy your version online