I hope that when future historians look back on October 18th, 2013, they do not identify it as the start of the robot apocalypse.

On that date, I made the initial commit for Fashionator, Rent the Runway's Hubot instance. Until then, most of the communication from machine to human at RTR had been done via e-mail: service alerts, Nagios, Airbrake, and so on. We did have PagerDuty, but rather than having accounts for everyone, we had one shared account tied to a physical on-call iPhone. It was pink. I was led to believe it had been dropped in the toilet at least once. It was so noisy that most people turned off the ringer and just kept an eye on the deluge of e-mail devastating the inbox. I was not a fan.

To be clear: I didn't initially create our robot to solve this problem. Fashionator was born the way all Hubots are born, with community scripts to spam people in your company chat with animated GIFs clipped from '80s cartoons or pictures of put-upon looking pugs donning dollar store Halloween costumes. I figured the robot would be a welcome diversion from our fires rather than a tool to help extinguish them.

I don't remember the first useful script I added—it might have been one that checked Heroku's status, since we used to host some of our Sinatra applications there—but I remember the moment when people began to think of Fashionator as a productivity tool instead of as a distraction. A member of our product team asked one of the engineers to flush caches in the storefront stage environment. I said, "Fashionator can do that," and asked the robot to flush Memcached, which she did.

HipChat exploded. "I had no idea she could do that!" "What else can she do?" Pull requests started coming into the Fashionator repo over the next several days, and at our next hack day, I volunteered to help people hack on Hubot. Over several more hack days, scripts to automatically handle stage orders, query the PagerDuty API, write JIRA tickets, and deploy our WWW site to QA and stage environments appeared. We put her under Puppet's control and gave her her own Jenkins deploy pipeline.

The benefits of maintaining Fashionator have been surprising and tremendous. The centralization of communication afforded by having her in HipChat, where most of us spend our day anyway, means that we see alerts and deploy announcements immediately; if there's an incident, we can gather in our war room and ask if there are problems with GitHub, find out who's on call, search JIRA tickets if we suspect a recent change has broken something, and more. Fashionator also increases transparency and accountability, since everyone can see (or review in HipChat logs) what she's doing and who asked her to do it. Improved communication facilitated by our Hubot has made us better at everything from identifying and fixing bugs to onboarding, and with API integration with GitHub, Jenkins, JIRA, PagerDuty, and more, we're constantly making it faster and easier to share knowledge and get things done.

There are, of course, still times when she's bad: