Long before Slack, Skype, and Hipchat introduced real-time chat to countless work environments, IRC has been a part of the communications backbone of the Net, enabling people to share real-time news even of the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the first Gulf War. It continues to be a popular tool for open source developers, and we use the #lib.reviews channel on irc.freenode.net (which you can access through Freenode’s web gateway if you don’t want to use an IRC client) for occasional real-time discussion.
Thanks to a pull request by Ori Livneh, lib.reviews now has its first IRC bot, ReviewBot. ReviewBot posts real-time notifications of reviews as they are posted to the site. This is accomplished through a webhook using the node-webhooks module. Basically, anytime a review is posted, we can queue up POST requests to a number of services to let them know a review is live. So, in future, we can use this same infrastructure to hook into other chat systems, or let apps that rely on our data know about relevant updates.