September 2024

BotCity Academy — Improvements and Learning Paths¶

This month, we are launching a series of updates on the BotCity Academy platform. The improvements are designed to enhance the experience of our users and students, along with the implementation of the learning paths feature.

Below is an overview of the new features and tools now available:

Academy Home¶

From this update, the BotCity Academy home will feature three sections:

• Learning Paths: BotCity content organized in a structured learning sequence, guiding students from basic to advanced knowledge. The learning paths include content in both Portuguese and English.
• Internal Courses: BotCity content created by our instructors and specialists.
• External Courses: Content about BotCity products created by technology industry instructors.

Course and Learning Path Information Page¶

On the course information page, users will find details about the course and learning paths, such as: course overview, course duration, topics covered, and information about the instructor teaching the course. Users will also find the languages in which the course is available.

"My Learning Journey" Section¶

In this section, users will find the courses and learning paths they are enrolled in or currently working on. On this page, users can also view completed courses, which can be revisited and reviewed at any time. Additionally, they can issue certificates directly from this section.

General Notes¶

• The learning paths will be available in two languages: Portuguese and English;
• Courses already completed by Academy students will be marked as finished and available for review;
• Users will be able to use the language filter to search and locate courses;
• Any platform visitor will have access to the home page and course information. If a visitor wishes to start a course, they will be directed to log in or sign up on the platform.

BotCity Studio SDK - 3.0.0.1¶

BotCity Runner - 3.1.0¶

This version of the BotCity Runner now generates probe files in the probes folder.

The probes are simply text files with the timestamp of when key events in the BotCity Runner lifecycle happened.

How can this be useful?¶

The main reason to provide probes is to be able to integrate the BotCity Runner with Kubernetes' Liveness, and Startup Probes.

Here is an example for such configurations in which the Startup Probe verifies for up to 300s (5 minutes) if the startup probe exists and after that it verifies if the heartbeat probe was updated in the past 45 seconds to ensure that the Runner is alive and working properly via the Liveness Probe:

    ...
    startupProbe:
    exec:
        command:
        - sh
        - -c
        - '[ -f ./probes/startup ] && exit 0 || exit 1'
    initialDelaySeconds: 5
    periodSeconds: 10
    failureThreshold: 30
    livenessProbe:
    exec:
        command:
        - sh
        - -c
        - '[ $(find ./probes/heartbeat -newermt "45 seconds ago" | wc -l) -eq 1 ] && exit 0 || exit 1'
    initialDelaySeconds: 5
    periodSeconds: 10

BotCity CI/CD Pipeline Utils - 1.0¶

In the earlier days the support was available to GitHub Actions via our BotCity Action - Bots official Action. All other CI/CD pipeline technologies had to either use the BotCLI.

Now it is easier than ever to integrate the bot Deploy, Update and Release operations with your favorite CI/CD pipeline.

We just launched the first production release of the BotCity CI/CD Pipeline Utils offering initially the bot operations.

Check out the examples available for GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, Woodpecker CI, BitBucket Pipelines, GitLab CI and Jenkins.