feat: start Songlify article

content/english/posts/songlify.md

@@ -0,0 +1,91 @@
+---
+title: "Building a Telegram bot in Rust: a journey"
+description: An adventure through Rust and Telegram
+tags:
+- blog
+- tech
+- rust
+- telegram
+date: 2022-01-02T15:32:00+02:00
+---
+
+Some time passed since the last article I wrote there. A lot of stuff happened
+meanwhile, especially with COVID, but here we are again. While busy dealing with
+the mess of real life tasks, three months ago I started to write a little bot
+for Telegram in Rust. It is a simple one, but I consider the journey interesting
+and worth of writing it down.
+
+## Telegram bots
+
+Telegram bots are not something new to me and nowdays are pretty much easy to
+make, so I consider them like a gym where to try out new technologies and
+experiment with stuff. I wrote plentiful of them, some of those are open source
+like for example https://github.com/Augugrumi/TorreArchimedeBot (I checked it
+out and now it is broken 😭) that was useful when going to University, because
+it scraped the university free room web page and from there it was able to tell
+you which rooms where without any lessons and for how much time, allowing you to
+easily find a place where to study with your mates (yep, we didn't like library
+too much).
+
+{{< figure src="/content/songlify/telegramscreen.png" alt=`A screenshot of
+TorreArchimedeBot in action.` caption=`A screenshot of TorreArchimedeBot in
+action.` >}}
+
+Also another one bot worthy of mention is
+https://github.com/Polpetta/RedditToTelegram, that allowed our D&D group to
+receive push notifications of our private Subreddit in our Telegram group.
+
+As you can see, all of these bots are quite simple, but they have the added
+value of teaching you some new programming concepts, technologies or frameworks
+that can be later applied in something that can be more production environment.
+
+## Rust
+
+I started to approach Rust many years ago (I don't remember exactly when). First
+interaction with it was quite interesting to say at least: there were way less
+compiler features (for example now the compiler is able to understand object
+lifetime at compile time most of the time alone, without specifying them) that
+made it a... _not-so-pleasant programming experience_. It had potential thought,
+so by following Rust news I picked it up last year again, noticing that now it
+has improved a lot and it is more pleasant to write. Meanwhile, also JetBrains
+developed a good support for IntelliJ, so now it is even possible to debug and
+perform every operation directly from your IDE UI.
+
+## World collision: Rust + Telegram
+
+One of the features I wanted to learn this time regarding Rust was the
+asynchronous support it offers. Rust started to have `async` support with
+[Tokio](https://tokio.rs/) framework, and recently the Rust team started to
+build the asynchronous functionality inside Rust itself. Even if in the first
+steps, it looks promising and the idea of a low-level language, without GC, with
+automatic memory management and so much safety having asynchronous support is
+exciting to me! 🥳 So the only option left, at this point, was to start messing
+around with it. I started by picking up one of the many frameworks that provides
+a layer for the Telegram APIs, [Teloxide](https://github.com/teloxide/teloxide).
+In particular, as you can see from its _README_, one of the examples starts by
+using `#[tokio:main]` macro:
+
+```rust
+use teloxide::prelude::*;
+
+#[tokio::main]
+async fn main() {
+    teloxide::enable_logging!();
+    log::info!("Starting dices_bot...");
+
+    let bot = Bot::from_env().auto_send();
+
+    teloxide::repl(bot, |message| async move {
+        message.answer_dice().await?;
+        respond(())
+    })
+    .await;
+}
+```
+
+This was the reason I picked it up, given that it looked the most promising by
+the time I started the project.
+
+### Building _Songlify_
+
+So, after choosing what was going to use to build the bot, I needed a _reason_ to build it.